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• Wednesday, November 19, 2008 05:38 AM

  Talking heads get boring fast

  Obama isn't even officially president yet, and already everybody's got an opinion on what he's doing wrong.

  Joan, I have to question your assertion that the left is his "base," that somehow they're responsible for his election. I want to see the figures that support that contention. I strongly suspect that you're wrong--that Obama was elected by a broad coalition of leftists and centrists, of blacks, whites, and Hispanics, of young and old, of Democrats AND independents. His responsibility is NOT to the Left; his responsibility is to all of us.

  I also disagree about the Lieberman pardon. Revenge is a fun thing, but it usually creates problems, even as it satisfies our primal urges for justice. Back in the Seventies, the university I attended had a great tactic for silencing student activist critics: it gave them jobs. Nothing shuts someone up faster than a paycheck. Just so with Lieberman. He is going to be hard-pressed to spout any more anti-Obama bs now, and it is more important to have him voting with the Democrats than it is to slap his wrist and make him stand in the corner for an hour.

  We can be "right," or we can accomplish something. That's the choice. It's easy to sit in front of a computer screen and decide what Obama should do, but the bottom line is this: the man ran an incredible, almost perfect political campaign against impossible odds and won. Clearly, he's not stupid. To paraphrase an old cliche: Those who can, do; those who can't, blog about it.

  —wendy82551 Read wendy82551's other letters
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