Dear President Obama...

Sad to say, we’ve become used to politicians that wouldn’t recognize the truth if it came up and bit them in the behind. It is the rule, not the exception, for them to tell us what we want to hear and say anything they have to say to get elected. There’s nothing new about that at all.

But you were supposed to be different. We the People elected you because you promised to change the way business was conducted in Washington. You promised transparency, and fiscal responsibility. You promised accountability. You promised change we could believe in.

Six weeks into your presidency, the reality is quite different.

Your promised bipartisanship went by the wayside as the stimulus bill was rammed through Congress with no attempt to involve Republicans in crafting it, or even in legitimate debate over what was in it. You told the American people that there was no “pork” at all in the stimulus bill. That is patently false, unless you plan to indulge in the kind of semantic gymnastics one of your predecessors indulged in over what the meaning of the word “is” is.

You promised to go line by line through the budget and eliminate waste. Those of us who know the Constitution understand that you don’t have the authority to do that – all you have is the power of the veto pen – but it doesn’t appear that you made any attempt at all to discourage the thousands of earmarks in the “omnibus” spending bill you just signed…even though you promised in your campaign to eliminate earmarks. Didn’t you understand at the time that you were making a promise you had no power to fulfill? If not, it reveals a stunning ignorance of the Constitution. If so, it means you were deliberately deceiving the people to win votes. Nothing new about that – but certainly not change I can believe in.

You stated publicly that although you found the spending bill distasteful, it was necessary to keep the government operating. That, also, is not true. Congress could have funded the government as long as necessary with more “continuing resolutions” that would simply have kept spending at last year’s level. By Senator Evan Bayh's estimate, that would have saved $250 billion over the next 10 years. That’s over a quarter of what the stimulus bill cost us. Instead, government got an 8% budget increase while the country is mired in what you keep telling us is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. My family didn’t get an 8% budget increase this year. The nation’s hundreds of thousands of unemployed didn’t either. I don’t see why the government should.

But in your eyes, it was “necessary” – just as it was necessary to pass the largest spending bill in our nation’s history before it was too late. Just as it is now necessary to move ahead NOW with health care reform, more money for education, and energy legislation that will kick the economy while it’s down.

I could go on, but the pattern is clear. You have an ideological agenda to implement, and you’re sprinting to the left as fast as you can, pulling the nation behind you, trying to get as much done as you can before enough people figure out what’s going on and put the brakes on. As Rahm Emanuel said, you don’t want to waste a good crisis.

There’s no change here in terms of how business is getting done. You’re just better than most at saying one thing while doing another and making people believe that up is down and day is night. But let me remind you of another quote from someone you claim to admire: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” I don’t believe that a majority of the American people share your ideological vision for the country – and you don’t either, or you wouldn’t be in such a hurry to implement your policies before it’s too late.

It’s a shame, really. You could have done so much good for the country. Instead, you’re proving yourself to be just another dishonest politician.