To the Next President, Whoever You Are

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

I am writing this letter before any results are in, but my message remains the same, regardless of the winner of this historic election.

These past few months, I’ve found myself losing faith in the political process. As I watched Congress pass a bailout bill loaded down with $100 billion of pork and raise the U.S. national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion—over 80 percent of our GDP in 2007—I shook my head in disgust. The original premise for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was that the treasury would buy up bad assets from banks’ balance sheets, and sell them at a later date. The treasury then did an about-face and semi-nationalized the banking industry. This change in plan without Congressional approval demonstrated just how much power Congress was willing to give to the treasury, shamefully signing over American values of personal and corporate responsibility in exchange for political cover. You, Mr. President-Elect, signed on to it too.

A year from now, interest groups and pundits will probably be criticizing you for not following through on your campaign pledges.

Please. Renege on your promises. I hope you’ve been pandering to interest groups and swing states during the campaign. I hope you won’t follow through on your public statements. Whether it’s a gas tax holiday, trillions of dollars in new spending, the unilateral re-opening of NAFTA, or a poorly conceived stimulus plan, please don’t follow through.

With our newly invigorated bailout culture, I’m sure that not long into your presidency, some company or industry or state will beg the government for its own bailout. I hope that you, Mr. President-Elect, have the courage to say no.

Am I glad this election cycle is over? I answer that question with a resounding yes. Like most Americans, I’m tired of the horse race, the media circus, and the punditry that has reached a new low. I’m tired of the “blame everyone but yourself” mentality that has come out of this financial crisis. Both campaigns have reinforced this with their rhetoric, whether by describing all homeowners as “innocent bystanders” in the crisis or calling people who don’t want to shoulder a higher tax burden unpatriotic or selfish.
The situation is far more complex than you have made it out to be during this campaign. Greedy bankers, predatory lenders, deregulation, and other culprits you have blamed for this crisis are only a small part of the problem we face today. I think it’s safe to say that you know this.

There have been some comparisons between today’s financial crisis and the Great Depression. During President Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, he warned Congress that if they could not agree on a definitive course of action, “and in the event that the national emergency is still critical,” he said that he would “not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

I hope I won’t hear a similar inaugural statement from you. In times of crisis, politicians use chaos as an excuse to claim more power for the government. I hope you, Mr. President-Elect, will have the judgment needed to resist. I hope you will be able to find a solution to this crisis without compromising the core American principles of self-responsibility and entrepreneurship that have built us into the great nation we are today.

Former governor Mario Cuomo once said that politicians “campaign in poetry, but have to govern in prose.”

I didn’t like the prose in the campaign, but some of the poetry, on both sides, was inspiring. Don’t follow through on all of your campaign promises, but I do hope that you will keep at least one of them, and fulfill your promise to stand with integrity, and reach out to both parties to find solutions that work for America. I hope that this promise wasn’t just more empty words used to sway swing voters. I hope that this time, Mr. President-Elect, you will actually be a uniter, not a divider.

Also during his first inaugural address, Roosevelt pronounced, “In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things.”

I wish this were true today. Whatever the outcome of this election is, America has some soul-searching to do. How can we fix our economy without ceding more power to the government? How can we as individuals, as well as our government, stop consuming more than we produce? How can we restore confidence in our cherished free market system?

There have to be better answers to these questions than those that the candidates provided during the campaign. I don’t have them. I hope you do.

America is facing unprecedented challenges. More unanticipated crises will inevitably present themselves during your presidency. May the next four years be better than the last. I put my faith in you.

Lauren Salz is a Barnard College sophomore. She is the executive director of the College Republicans and Check Your Premises runs alternate Wednesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com">Opinion@columbiaspectator.com