Now What?

Barack Obama will be my president on January 20, 2009. I am a citizen of the United States of America, and we have one commander in chief (at a time, as president-elect Obama recently noted). The people have elected the next one and, even though I did not vote for him, Barack Obama will be the 44th president. So on January 20, I will watch the inauguration, and I will be proud in the orderly transfer of power in this country. A new era will dawn, just as it did 8 years ago, and 8 years before that. This is one of the best things about this country - when the majority of the people speak, the government becomes their voice.

Perhaps President Obama will be good for America - I don't know yet. I would like to think that I am a conservative in the vein of Barry Goldwater, but I am not old enough to remember Goldwater's campaigns. I can only ask the people who were there (my father for instance) to comment upon the ideas I support. I have been disappointed enough in the Republican party to consider voting for Bob Barr (who ran as a Libertarian) but I wanted to make a vote that wasn't just a protest vote. More people were For Obama and the ideas that he represented - so he won. Now what do I do?

I do what I like to think I have always done: I wait for the president to propose his policies, I decide whether or not I agree with them, I wait to see if they work, and then I support people for office who think and feel like I do. I will wait at least 18 months - I can't bring myself to think about the 2010 mid-term elections before then - to see if President Obama will be good for the United States of America.

And so, for the sake of the country, let us hope he will be. If his mantra was "yes we can" then mine will be "show me how". The ball is firmly in the Democrats’ court - their party controls all of the electable branches of the federal government. I will watch and wait and hope, just as the president-elect said I should.

Joshua C. Sasmor