The real Barack Obama

To all of you who are pretending to be so shocked that Obama is shaping up to be a rather moderate President and not the rabid leftist pinko-commie Trotskyite that Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly told you he would be all I can say is, you're a moron. If you actually "drank the koolaid", as Bill is so fond of saying, and believed that President-elect Obama was a Socialist then you obviously don't know what a Socialist is. And at the same time, if you are now shocked because you had hoped he would be a radical leftist then you too are a moron.

Barack Obama is, above all else, politician. Granted, he is a phenomenally better politician than George Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin or Joe Biden, but he's still a politician. I believe he will make some great changes (or try to) for this country, and I believe that we as a nation will benefit from greater respect abroad, but he's still going to try and keep most of the country happy (or at least not angry).

He's not going to take your guns, he's not going to force you to abort your baby, he's not going to burn your church to the ground, and he certainly isn't going to get every last American soldier out of Iraq and Afghanistan in the next 4 years. These are the compromises that exist in American politics and we should be grown up enough by now to recognize them. Americans need to stop taking what they hear on the campaign trail as the gospel and start viewing it for what it is...campaigning.

At the end of the campaign Republicans were without a message so they ran ads calling Obama a risky radical. Not because they believed he was, but because they believed that would stop people from voting for him. Likewise, the Democrats pushed the notion that McCain was the same as Bush, not because they really believed it, but because they thought it would resonate with the anger people had towards this administration and be good for their candidate. If you want to be disappointed, fine. If you feel disgusted by it, fine. But it's just how the game is played.

The most important thing isn't getting someone elected but making them do right by you once they are in office. President-elect Obama has vowed to make his administration one of the most open and transparent administrations in American history. Good! Use that! Go to the websites, send emails, make phone calls and not just to his organization but to your local elected officials: your Congressman/woman, your Senators, your Governor, your state assemblyman/woman and your city councilman/woman. If you sit around with your thumb up your butt don't be surprised when nothing happens because despite what anyone says on the campaign trail, they are influenced by the voices that keep talking after the voting is done.