I have a suggestion for a first item on the President-elect’s legislative agenda. You will not find it in the laundry list of party-pleasing favorites being counted off by both House and Senate Democratic leaders. Indeed, though it is has made a sizable contribution to the current financial crisis and looms even larger in the decades to come, it barely received mention in the debates or the campaigns. Yet addressing this issue first is the only way to make all the promises made during the campaign feasible. President-elect Obama must address the nation’s broken entitlement system and the national debt which will ultimately crush all of his other promises if not addressed.
Many on the left see this as a Republican issue. I assure you, it is not. Bipartisan panels have studied these issues for decades. It is not that the solutions are unknown or unknowable. It is merely that professional politicians feel the solutions are unpalatable to a public that is unaccustomed to self-sacrifice. Surely a President many claim as Kennedy reincarnate can call the nation to make the tough calls necessary to produce a lasting change and not an illusory one which ends upon his departure from this highest office. The promise of universal health care, the promise of increased opportunities for education, and all other promises being tauted as critical to the new President’s first days in office will be broken promises if he doesn’t not seize this moment in time to produce real change.
What a vast disappointment it would be if the promise of change embodied by the results of Tuesday’s election has already departed us. I did not vote for President-elect Obama, but I was hopeful that his elevation to that office could usher in a new era of greatness. He possesses many admirable qualities and his success is, as virtually all commentators agree, well-deserved and a fulfillment of the ideals America claims to embody.
Buoyed by an electoral college mandate and aided by a sizeable legislative majority, President-elect Obama can become a statesman of historic proportions. Alternatively, he can continue the partisan politics of the past and pander to his party’s need to lord their victory over the other side.
