Dear Barry,

Cool, dude!  You really showed up for this one, although it wasn’t until around 11pm Monday night with that inspiring and emotional speech in Iowa.  Your campaign strategy, even though you eked out the victory, should have been much more substantial and positive.  After all, you were running against a guy that nobody, on either side, liked or trusted, (family and cultists partially excepted), who was an empty suit-over-magic-underwear, appealing only to the 48% of voters who simply wanted you gone.  But, hey…you get your four more years.  If you want to make the best of them, you will have to puff up your chest, roll up your sleeves, put on your game face, (avoid pulling yourself up by your bootstraps at all cost), and refuse to let the whimpering, namby-pamby Republican leadership hijack any smart, sane, patriotic program aimed at making us all act fairer, more responsibly and kinder to one another and our planet.  You will have to do this by taking these ideas to the public, (as well as Congress), in a clear and decisive manner.  When the whackos respond, (as they have already begun to do with their simpler, cleaner crap), supported by fictional data and Rove-Limbaugh-Speak lies and bullshit, you must respond, unemotionally, with the very loud and precise TRUTH.  I can’t promise that 47%, (the factually challenged 47% not the Romney lazy-shiftless 47%), of the country will listen, but last Tuesday, if nothing else, was a referendum on the persistent prevailing trend of sanity over reactive parochialism.  Let’s, (like I have anything to do with any of this), be bold and decisive and win over a few more wafflers from the dark side.

You knew I’d have some thoughts:

• The Tax Code is a very bad joke.  Everyone hates it for their own twisted reasons.  It needs to be trashed and, (here’s where John Boehner and I agree), simplified.  Fighting a time consuming battle over adjustments to a too-broken-to-fix system in just dumb.  We need something as simple as:

$0-$50K…no tax

$50K-$250K…12%

$250K-$1M…18%

$1M and up…25%

Personal deductions for education and home mortgages and business deductions for employee benefits…period.  Zero tolerance for unpatriotic, traitorous cheaters.

• Education…education…education!

• Address…immediately…our life-threatening responsibility to the environment and the resultant catastrophe of Climate Change.  Get more in the face of the fossil fuel lobby that wants to kill us all.  (Thursday’s shameful announcement by the coal producers that they will be eliminating thousands of jobs because of the threat your reelection poses to the black-lung industry needs to be turned quickly and shamelessly against them).

• Real Financial Reform and Regulation – Jesus:Moneychangers   Obama:Wall St.

• Real Universal Health Care – If only because it’s just cheaper to maintain a healthy society than to continue to profit from the illness and misery of an ailing one.

• Election Reform – has anyone checked the calendar?  Why is this even an issue?

I’ve got more, but you could jump right on these between now and January so you hit the second term running.  I’ll get back to you as soon as you’re done.

All the best,

Joel

PS – anyone using the term ‘fiscal cliff’ should be made to go two rounds, bare knuckles, with Iron Mike.