Obama faces hard choices
To the Editor,
A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would've known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as president wouldn't go away overnight.
During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn't be fixed in a year, and that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires and would not be an easy venture for us. Candidate Obama didn't feed us happy-talk, which is why we elected him. He never said America could solve our health care, economic and security problems without raising the deficit. Instead, he talked of hard choices, of government taking painful and contentious first steps towards fixing problems that can't be left for another day.
Right after Obama's election, we seemed to grasp this. We understood that companies would be happy to squeeze more work out of frightened employees and would be slow to hire more. We understood that the banks that had extorted us out of billions of dollars were lying when they said they would share their recovery. We understood that a national consensus on health care would not come easily. Candidate Obama never claimed that his proposed solutions would work flawlessly right out of the box, and we respected him for that.
But today, the President is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never made such a promise. It's time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can't just wave a magic wand and fix everything.
Ellie Light
Follansbee
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MondoF
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01-26-10 9:16 AM
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Ellie Light comes to WV! She's sent over 60 letters 60+ in 32 different states, claiming to live locally in each paper's area. She's a real estate mogul and an Internet legend, all wrapped up into one. Follansbee is her home in WV? That's great, she was probably a Bruin. And to think I got to see her letter in the Weirton Daily Times.
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melanerpes
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01-23-10 10:51 PM
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The "Ellie Light" letter is part of a fairly ambitious nationwide astroturf campaign. Please visit Patterico's Pontifications for a list of the dozens of newspapers, large and small, that have been victimized by this scam.
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WestVirginia304
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01-23-10 4:41 PM
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You know this letter is fake, don't you? Google Ellie Light. This same letter has been sent to around 100 papers in the U.S., all claiming to live near the newspaper. It is a chain mail type scam on your publication and you just got dupped!
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