4 September 2009
Good morning Mr President,
Did you really mean it?
Tonight I decided it was time to watch, once again, your interview on 25 November 2007 with the editorial staff of the Keene (NH) Sentinel:
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Among the impressions I took away from that interview, the first time I watched it (a day or so after it happened) were:
- The guy really has a great laugh ... a great smile;
- I'd never, ever let that great laugh or great smile distract me from the core message of that interview.
So, just to be sure I'm not making any assumptions, please allow me to ask:
- If you detect that someone is messing with you;
- Whether you smile, and assuredly you won't shout, you will 'crush' the fool who thought they could treat you as a naive, bumpkin, community organizer, .... whatever.
Did I get it, Mr President?
Starting with your Chief of Staff - should everyone inside the Beltway (and in a variety of corporate offices) watch, maybe two or three or four times, this interview in the days prior to your 9 September 2009 address to Congress?
Mr President, you have been open - almost to a fault - these past several months.
No one of lucid mind and access to even the horrid American corporate media can doubt you have tried to listen, to be inclusive, to care.
You tried to listen to objections, to suggestions (few coming from anyone other than stalwarts of reason and humanity like Kennedy, Weiner, Conyers, ...).
Yes, Mr. President, you have been open. You have tried to include the radical right wing of American politics as represented in Congress and elsewhere by Republicans.
And, Mr. President, you would not be hasty, or in any way emotional or, more importantly, incorrect in your judgement now that those folk have been, well let's just say, dishonest, disingenuous, disruptive, prone to inciting violence (including against you), and overall nasty.
You tried. They failed - big time.
What to do?
Let's go to the FDR playbook tonight Mr. President and I urge you to study it and act accordingly on 9 September 2009.
To wit:
"Roosevelt relished the opposition of vested interests. He fashioned his governing majority by deliberately attacking those who favored the status quo. His opponents hated him — and he profited from their hatred. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told a national radio audience on the eve of the 1936 election. “They are unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
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Roosevelt understood that governing involved choice and that choice engendered dissent. He accepted opposition as part of the process."
Roosevelt: The Great Divider
Mr. President, the choice is yours. It's pull back the curtain time, Mr. President. We will all know on 9 September 2009 precisely what kind of President you are and will be.
What's it going to be Mr. President - are you a leader or are you just a clever guy looking for ways to have folk like you for that great smile and clever wit.
We are all soon to know.
I HOPE you are not just as able as FDR, I hope you achieve in the next 3.5 years (and beyond) even more than he did. Americans will flourish for decades if that is your legacy.
We are all soon to know.
Thank you,
Bob
'This age, what does it demand of me?'