Today, the American people are entering a courtship, a marriage if you will, with a new president who inches towards the Oval Office with an inspiring yet cautionary tone, and a policy palette sure to be historic, for reasons many of us do not yet know.  While it is an accomplishment for the American people, to have elected Barack Obama and handed him the reins of government for the next four years, the true tests and measures for our country, of course, lie ahead.  As the nation circles around the Capitol and TV sets and Internet feeds to watch the inauguration, the excitement of Wedding Day is hard to ignore.  The Obama Presidency, as we know, promised Hope, Change and a 'Can Do' attitude in the White House, along the campaign trail, picking up the lost souls and disgruntled masses and frustrated demographics that have been in a self-imposed state of wretchedness for over eight years.  There is catharsis pervading the land, a giant exhalation that can only foreshadow an honest hope, in many hearts, of a change for this nation.  As with any marriage, life does change the morning after, our cares are no longer, or should no longer, be focused solely on ourselves.  Our futures, tied to each other, our feelings and whims influenced and often shaped by forces outside of us.  But as with any successful marriage, the true tests lie in the hours, days and years following the triumphant wedding, when life casually recedes back to its normal ebb and flow, and challenges we faced alone, we now face together;  decisions we once made in silos or with little afterthought, must now be made with pointed deliberation.

I share with our new president a cautionary optimism.  I believe things can get done in politics, as in life, when all the information we can possibly muster is on the table, and when the decision making is focused for the benefit of the couple, or in this case, the nation, rather than one spouse or the other, one demographic or special interest...or the other.  Our new president rode into office with a powerful, energetic wave of promise:  SOMETHING DIFFERENT.  While not an especially deep or revealing platform, Obama's brand of change was nonetheless effective, because of the public's distrust or distaste for complexities and nuance in politics, simply disassembling the figurehead and installing a new one seemed sufficient, or in other words, ANYTHING DIFFERENT would do.

But now the hard part begins.  There is a tremendous deficit of economic energy in the United States today.  Where previous generations were challenged by the economic demands of war, post-war booms, a race to space and a communication and entertainment shift away from three networks and a cloud of dust, today America finds it has dug itself into a deep rut in terms of manufacturing, science, research and innovation.  The entrepreneurial mindset, that sparked imagination and launched hallmark products and brands in the past, is no longer monopolized by America.  In fact, America has considerably receded from coming up with big ideas and big leaps in human progress to merely providing a voracious appetite for the new and the new-fangled.

America also finds itself in a frightening tailspin with respect to education.  What passes for a high school or college education today is vastly different than standards imposed upon previous generations.  While anecdotal as that may sound, there is considerable evidence in our economy that shows how college education became more and more personal, and less and less contributive to the public good.  That is a byproduct of our celebrated Age of Choice, where the marketplace for education and personal interests has grown exponentially, while yielding questionable results and negligible benefits for the country as a whole.

The country also finds itself in what can only be described as a self-fulfilling death spiral of mistrust.  Politicians have a much shorter leash in the eyes of the voting public, and are far more exposed in this new Age of Choice than they were in decades and generations past.  Financial markets now officially serve the interests of pooled wealth and commercial entities.  The practice of individual wealth management does not attract the best and brightest, and the past decade of corporate excess fueled by regulatory and accounting appeasement has succeeded in uncoupling the average American from the equities markets.  Rather than seeking to acquire and grow wealth, Americans now find an imperative in consolidating and preserving what cash and capital that remain.  Without individual investment, America's economic engine will be forced to pursue debt financing, which tends to carry more risk and less reward.  Eventually, investment alternatives do crop up;  today it's wine, art and other investment vehicles.  But these are not diversified, and in the long run carry a tremendous amount of risk for investors.  What has accompanied the vaporization of the marketplace of ideas is a vaporization of the marketplace for sound investments.

So, today the economy can't find its way, investors have nowhere to turn and America as a whole is quickly dividing into camps of low-wage earners and their high-wage employers, due in great part to the availability, affordability and choices in education.  These are not problems that lend themselves to quick fixes, regardless of the trillions of dollars thrown into the furnace to get the engine going again.  These are structural deficits.  And our new president knows this.  What will be interesting to see, is if and how the new president addresses these structural deficits, as they are numerous, complex and costly.  What Mr. Obama needs to change is HOW America is governed.  What he also needs to change is HOW America views itself.  Of late, none of his cabinet appointments, policy communications or messages to the public indicate WHAT change is in the offing.  Much attention has been paid to the youth, race and associations of the new president.  Virtually NO attention has been paid to why we are here, economically speaking, and what has, can and should be done to improve our situation.

Whatever mandate Obama and his supporters believe they've won with this election will be short-lived without continuing the momentum with concrete initiatives that work toward fixing our structural deficits and without a few short-term victories that extract the country out of its psychological malaise.  We are a people who look to our leaders, too often, to extricate ourselves from predicaments of our own doing.  We, as a people, haven't demanded enough of ourselves, and our elected representatives, to change the way America is and will be.  We haven't changed our fiscal behavior, we haven't changed the weight and importance placed on applicable education, we haven't changed our own political intellect and involvement, and we surely haven't changed our habits of outsourcing the difficult work we must do as individuals, when we are most vulnerable to political influence and promise-peddling.

In short, my HOPE is that Americans CHANGE.  Because what works in our capitol and in the halls of government around the country isn't going to change with Mr. Obama's presidency.  He will be no different from an execution and compromising standpoint than any of his predecessors UNLESS the American public, in relatively short order, CHANGE the way they view themselves and their country.  One man is not going to reverse the tide, and so this morning I am wary of the pressures and adulation placed on our new president.  His presidency will not represent a deluge of new ideas, because the mechanism by which he was elected and chooses to govern is substantially founded in established ideology, that government is charged with administrating the lives of people, and it cannot do so without significant abdication of the people's freedom.  I would challenge all Americans, regardless of political persuasion, to examine their own hopes and to examine the changes they can make in their own lives, and what those changes mean in the context of the rest of the country.  Without knowing some of the intricacies of the machine, we relinquish much of the way that machine works to our elected officials, moving ourselves from a representative democracy to an administrative autocracy.  While we may find some comfort in letting others clean our homes or wash our cars, the slow and dangerous migration of the American public away from political discourse and involvement will ultimately yield to technocratic leadership that only has its own interests in mind.  We cannot outsource our political will, regardless of how attractive, optimistic and sexy that service provider may appear at the time.  In order for Hope and Change to materialize into Better and Now, Americans, not the government, have to do the heavy lifting.  For the country's marriage with Obama to be a successful one, each of us has to get off the couch, but down the remote and get to working on that relationship;  it simply cannot function to our benefit on auto-pilot.  So as the honeymoon comes to an end, and America returns its focus to the pressing matters of the day, the meaning and influence of each American's political and economic will can't be understated.  While it may seem expedient and popular to cast our sorrows and hopes upon a new president and hope for the best, the fact that successful marriages require hard work, communication and honesty can't be ignored.  It's time for Americans to prepare and to act upon governing themselves, before the nature and blessings of our democracy change forever.