“Welcome the hour that may put me where a man cannot take a dollar in exchange for a soul!”
                                                    - John Weiss

At roughly noon today, the citizens of the United States of America will be delivered from the George W. Bush Imperial Presidency, with its attendant arrogance, politicization, secrecy, law breaking and general incompetence.  Our course will now be charted by Barack Obama, a man who insists on bringing intelligent thought to the office to which it has been generally barred for the past eight years.

Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times on Saturday, observed, “The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.  W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it.  (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.)  Obama is delighted by doubt.”

In 2001, Bush delivered an inaugural address in which he pledged, “I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well.”  On Keith Olbermann’s show Thursday night, Bush’s former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan noted, “The president won‘t even acknowledge a single mistake of significance.  And that‘s a problem, because you‘re not going get people to pay attention if you don‘t do that.”

Bush leaves office as the most disliked president in American history.  In the final New York Times - CBS News poll of his presidency, Bush received only a 22 percent approval rating.  Of course, this polling process is only seventy-odd years old, so some of Bush’s predecessors in the Oval Office might have done worse—James Buchanan, for instance, or possibly Warren G. Harding.  But since Bush seems to be easily pleased with small accomplishments, he can revel in the fact that he beat Dick Cheney, who scored a 13 percent approval rating.  In contrast, Barack Obama is assuming the leadership of the Free World with a pre-presidential approval rating of 67 percent.

The list of issues King George has left to his successor is virtually endless, but I should take some space to mention the more glaring –

1. The trampling the U.S. Constitution received at the hands of George Bush and Dick Cheney
2. The illegal war foisted on the American people by a president (aided and abetted by many Democrats in Congress) addicted to lies around weapons of mass destruction, driven by political aspirations and supported by specious legal arguments and manipulated intelligence.
3. Increased illegal surveillance of American citizens. 
4. The question of how George W. Bush and his Svengalian vice president could escape accountability before the Congress for subverting constitutional law and flouting international law.
5. The second-worst economic situation in our country’s history, including unprecedented disparity between those at the top of the economic scale and those at the bottom, with a substantial depletion of the middle class.
6. A faltering educational system that has placed a college education out of the financial reach of many Americans while failing millions of others before they even complete high school.
7. A healthcare system that has left twenty percent of Americans without access to proper medical care and placed an economic burden on millions of others.

Our hope today is that with Barack Obama at the helm, the Ship of State can be righted, that we can remove the tarnish from our image, and that our Nation can regain much of that which was lost during the Bush years in office. 

That is our hope.  But the lingering question is, “How much is really possible?”  It is always much easier to tear down than to build up; easier to declare war than to negotiate a peace; easier to silence the opposition than to build a coalition.  Bush had all the easier parts.  To Obama now fall the difficult ones.