A message for Obama

Dear Mr. President-elect:
That was some campaign you waged. From your use of text messages to your blogs you have won the election. Young voters came out in droves for you.

And your appearances in Europe- wow!

I was particularly impressed with the way you countered McCain’s charges. You came right back at him with answers to his criticisms. Of course, FactCheck sometimes had trouble making your numbers add up but that was true of most campaign promises from both sides. The theoretical always has certain advantages, disadvantages, and unknowns.

And I noted all the Internet posters who came to your defense, making favorable comments about you at the end of those on-line newspaper articles.

But the campaign is one thing; running the Executive Branch is quite another. And your ambitious legislative agenda will be a full-time job all by itself.

Now that the election is over you must realize that running the White House is quite a different matter than running a campaign. I’m sure you are keenly aware that 58,343,671 people voted for McCain, not you.

You must not take too much stock in your admirers. There is a certain percentage of Americans out there who would say, “Awesome,dude. Obama rocks!”, if you told them that the President-elect had sex with Blagojevich in order to get his pick into the senate.

More importantly, when you go on the defensive now your opponent isn’t McCain; it’s the American people. When you become obsessed with “proving” that you didn’t misspeak when you told us on December 9th, “I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so we were not -- I was not aware of what was happening.”, your rival isn’t McCain anymore. Your “rival” is now US.

You must live by a different standard now. If someone on your team is having discussions with Blago (whether they are wheeling-and-dealing or not) you simply need to tell us the TRUTH.

Surely you knew Emanuel was talking with Blago.

Surely you knew that Jarrett had discussions with him.

Surely you knew that somehow the SEIU was dragged into it and was involved in putting together a three way in your behalf.

The campaign is over; stop acting like a candidate. You’ll find that being an executive is much harder than you thought.