Dear Mr. President-Elect,

Dear President-Elect Obama,

CONGRATULATIONS! I am proud and honored to call you my next Commander-In-Chief, and I will be honest and forthright in my service under your command.

I have spoken (written) about you on this site before. I have hailed you as a leader and I have criticized you as indecisive. I have pointed out your ability to inspire, and I have called you to task for inaction. Now, less than a day after your historic victory, I'd like to take a few minutes to tell you what's on my mind, and perhaps make a couple of small suggestions. I will try not to take up too much of your time, as I suspect you may be slightly busy for the next four to eight years!

Oddly enough, it's those four to eight years that I'd like to talk about...

Sir, I don't need to tell you that we're in a bit of a pickle right now. You face an economic crisis of proportions that have not been hinted at since before your birth. You are tapped to lead a nation that is suffering a loss of prestige on the international stage and a loss of self-confidence at home. You are the (proud?) inheritor of two wars that will be presented to you in "As Is" condition and no Lemon Law protection! In short, you have already done something amazing and almost miraculous just by getting elected, but that was the easy part! Now is where things get a bit rough! Fortunately, I'm here to help! Please allow me to present:

The Sage Words Pre-Presidency Primer on Profoundly Perplexing Problems
(or: How to Use Alliteration to Authentically Assuage Astoundingly Aggravating Actualities)

This guide is not intended to actually solve the problems I'm about to ennumerate. If it could do that, you could've skipped the entire election and just slipped me a finsky and called it good! No, I just want to give you the common (my friends would say sub-common!) person's perspective of what's wrong with the world. I may have an idea or two to fix things as well, but I think I'll save that for another letter. After all, I expect us to become pen-pals after this!

So for starters, the economy is in tatters. But the problem is, our economy no longer runs on money, or production, or credit, or things; our economy is the largest faith-based program in the world! It's about confidence, faith, and a willingness to accept a little bit of risk. But no one will accept risk any more!

The only reason the mortgage crisis was able to drag our economy down so far is because we have bred the risk-takers out of our country. Every loan was packaged and sold with other loans for a profit. Then those packages were bundled and sold for another profit. Then the bundles were sold to the government (Fannie and Freddy were always govenrment, no matter what Donald Trump thinks!) for yet another profit! But the best part is, risk was eliminated! Fannie and Freddy bought anything and everything and didn't care what was in it! This taught the lenders that any risk was acceptable, because there was really NO risk! At least not to them! Couple this with an unregulated system of self-policing and you get rediculous numbers of rediculous loans for rediculous deals, all guarenteed by Uncle Sam!

Seriously Mr. Obama, find a way to restore confidence by restoring risk. The risk weeds out the greedy pigs and dolts and whomever is left standing, you can have more confidence in! Then you invest in them! Survival of the (fiscally) fittest! (As it turns out, Darwin was an economist!)

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We are at war. Why we are at war is not your issue, it belongs to history. Please keep this in mind as you plan your first steps into an arena that is, for the moment, beyond your experience. Listen to your troops and digest what they have to tell you. I promise you, an army enlisted soldier with three tours on the ground in Iraq and one in Afghanistan knows a lot more than they get credit for most of the time. Your Generals will all give you outstanding advice on strategy and tactics, but none of them has ever had to pour fuel-oil into a full latrine pit and stir it with a stick as it burns. Go find a couple of troops that have done that, and talk to them before you decide how to handle the Middle East. Perspective is a valuable thing.

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Cooperation. You said in a lot of your speeches that you were going to reach across the isle. I think this is a ridiculous concept. If you reach across the isle, and the Republicans reach across the isle, and Nancy Pelosi reaches across the isle, and everyone else reaches across the isle, you're going to all end up over balanced and falling on your faces (like that's never happened in Washington before!)! Here's a bit of free advice:

JUST GET INTO THE ISLE!

Get into the isle, Sir! Bring your friends! Bring your enemies! Bring a picnic lunch, but get IN there and quit holding on to the stupid, compulsive, selfish, and ignorant need to keep one foot firmly planted on "your side" of the isle! There are no sides anymore! We face too many really important challenges to hold onto our ancient, well-worn, classical, hand-tooled ideology the way we used to! If you have to be a liberal and someone else has to be a conservative all the time, you will never see eye to eye. The only true ideology for a President is service to the people. All of them.

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Use your resources! I may be a tiny bit off here, but while I was watching you and Senator McCain give your speeches on election night, I got the distinct impression that you two were up to something! I think one of the best things you could do going forward would be to offer the Senator a place in your new administration. He's a born leader, a master warrior, and the very picture of patriotism our nation still needs to be able to rally around. If he were in the comics, he'd be Captain America! Only, you know, not quite as muscle-bound.

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President-Elect Obama, you have just earned for yourself the world's second-hardest job (naked cat-hearding is the first). People will second- and third-guess everything you do (and that's appropriate), but if you plan your Presidency as well as you planned your campaign, you will find yourself appreciated more ofen than not. So keep your head up, your back straight, and march proudly into the White House on January 20th, knowing that you belong there, you are wanted there, and you deserve to be there. But also know that it was regular people who put you there, and who are counting on you to do right by them. From what I've seen so far, I don't think we'll be dissappointed.


Thank you for your time Mr. President-Elect. And thank you for your service.



-Sage Words