BY
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As the celebration of a historic victory for President-elect Obama ’91 gives way to sober consideration of our path forward, we must put our new leader to the test by demanding a comprehensive plan which outlines the nation’s next steps in key policy areas. The editors of the Harvard Law Record would like our next President to make good on his promise to always be honest with the people by answering the following five questions:
1. How can an ordered withdrawal from Iraq be accomplished without resulting in the destabilization of the tenuously established national government?
2. How would the devotion of greater resources to the conflict in Afghanistan resolve the inability of our forces to quell the return of the Taliban?
3. How can you pursue all your stated objectives in the domestic policy arena without levying major revenue generating taxes?
How can the nation’s crumbling infrastructure be renewed while state and local governments are suffering from crippling revenue shortfalls?
What specific technological and economic initiatives can we expect in the campaign toward energy independence?
If the change we need has truly arrived in Washington, then the next leader of our nation will abandon the permanent campaigning and buzz-word spin doctoring of the outgoing neo-conservatives and address these issues in a candid manner. In this era of blogging, podcasting, and YouTube, our President should not rely on the narrow channels of network media to craft a stylized image of the national government and its leadership.
The fireside chats of FDR need to be updated for the twenty-first century if the nation’s disillusionment with the economy and government is to be healed in a generation. President Obama’s answers to these questions must be measured and pragmatic, or else this chance at renewed faith in coordinated national government will be squandered, to the detriment of the entire world.