To the Honorable Senator from Illinois Barack Obama:

For the first time since I turned 18 years old, I am excited about a presidential election.  For the first time I believe there really is hope that this nation can transcend and overcome the many ills that plague our society.  For the first time I am eager to see what our country will do to help change the world for the better.  For the first time since I have been able to vote, Mr. Obama, I have been inspired by a presidential candidate.

But I am also worried.  I am worried that this feeling of inspiration and hope will be as short-lived as the positive rhetoric of campaigns often are.   I fear that that once you enter the White House (and I pray you do) the realities of Washington politics will overtake you, that you will forget what brought you to the presidency.  I worry that negative special interests, powerful as they are, will find their way to your doorstep and convince you to abandon your most basic ideals in the name of political expediency.  And to be honest, I do fear that the many speeches you delivered during your campaign will not translate into real, committed action and that your inexperience in government will be as much of a vice as it was for John F. Kennedy, a man who meant well but gave in too readily to the forces of Washington.

And while these are certainly things that I fear, I am also afraid that you will ignore the many issues most other politicians ignore, thus showing no marked difference between you and your predecessors.  Please do not forget the millions upon millions of impoverished and working poor on whose backs the wealth of corporate America is amassed.  Remember to fight for a real minimum wage, a living wage, that allows poor Americans the ability to not only make ends meet but to secure a better future for themselves and their children.  Please do not ignore, like so many before you, the up to one million homeless Americans, many of them children, that wander the streets every night.   I beg you not to forget the economically and socially isolated people of Appalachia, whose lives for generations have been separated in many ways from the progress of America.

Please, Mr. Obama, do not reduce debate over America's education system to how our children, these young, vibrant human beings, can serve America's corporations.  They deserve better.  They deserve a quality education for its own sake and no other.  They have a need to be uplifted, to be empowered to make their own decisions in order to be not servants of the system but the pilots of their own destinies.  Mr. Obama, please remember the gross inequalities in America's schools that perpetually separate the haves and the have-nots and that has helped create a semi-permanent underclass in the supposed land of opportunity.  Please fight to end the segregation of America's schools and to ensure that all schools, regardless of where they are and who attends them, are funded equally and fairly in this supposed land of equality and justice.  And speaking of justice, I ask that you seriously reconsider the immoral and unfair practice legalized murder committed in the name of justice, the death penalty.

Mr. Obama, I beg that you radically alter as president America's approach to foreign policy in ways that would make all of your predecessors shutter.  This country has long trumpeted itself as being the upholder of democracy, the beacon of light for the rest of the world, while at the same time overthrowing democratically elected governments worldwide because it was in our economic interest to do so.  The United States has been the self-proclaimed supporter of human rights while committing or supporting massive atrocities, directly and indirectly, across the globe, from Nicaragua to Indonesia, from Israel to Cuba.   I pray that you understand that we cannot have it both ways.  Please help lead America toward realizing its ideals by withdrawing any support of regimes and policies that undermine the belief that all human beings have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Do these things, Mr. Obama, and you will go down as the greatest president this country has ever known.  You will have done more for more people worldwide than any one president before you could have imagined.  And know that if you lead in this way, the fact that you will be the first African American president in American history will be a meaningless subscript.  You will have the real, deepest support of not only the majority of Americans but the majority of the world, something no president has ever been able to achieve.