That was Michelle's advice to Barack at the 2004 Democratic Convention before his speech that brought the house down and established himself on the National scene.
I don't see any indications that Obama is going to screw it up. But Ramesh Ponnuru in Time talks about how the Right will be waiting in the wings for people to care about their arguments again.
http://www.time.com/...
When a party suffers the kind of beating the Republicans have taken in the past two elections, the public has not rejected one of its factions. It has rejected the party as a whole. Voters have turned on pro-choice as well as pro-life Republicans, on Senators who favored amnesty and ones who fought it. Evidently voters did not believe that Republicans of any stripe offered solutions to the challenges America faces now.
Ramesh points out that the Right still has hope eternal in the UK:
Daniel Finkelstein, a British Conservative, recently wrote that his party went through a similar period of internal strife after Tony Blair kicked it out of office in 1997. More painful than all the mutual recriminations, he wrote, was the slow realization that nobody outside a small circle cared about any of these arguments. More than a decade later, Conservatives are still out of power in Britain.
Barack is on the right path. He's accomplishing more in his pre-Presidency than Bush has done all year. His recent choices for cabinet positions have given Wall Street a bounce up, and given a lot of people hope that he will actually do what he promised to do during the campaign and get rid of politics as usual in Washington.
Just don't screw it up, Buddy, or the GOP will be back to screw things up even worse...
Keep up the good work, Obama!