An open letter to Barack Obama

Congratulations. Yours is a historic achievement which should dispel for time and eternity the fiction that America is a racist nation.

Savor the headiness, because headaches are certain to follow.

First of all, this is the end of the road. There are no more offices to seek or rungs to climb.

While those experiences have made you the consummate campaigner, you will find actual governing an entirely different animal.

It will be impossible for you to live up to the unrealistic expectations projected onto you. But they are there.

You are a gifted man, but you are a young man, understandably and easily seduced by adoring crowds and media outlets which are notoriously fickle.

The level of adulation has only one way to go from henceforth and that is down. How you adjust and manage that will in no small part determine your legacy.

Remember you owe this prospect to events you did not create and cannot control.

Wall Street and Washington are both broken. Like two drunken 800-pound sailors on a nightmare shore leave, they have handed you the White House but they have also handed you the tab.

Your fellow Democrats, likely to overreach, will twist your arm to spin your promise on taxes. Break that pledge, and you will be taking carpentry lessons from Jimmy Carter in four short years.

This is not a mandate, it is an opportunity. It is a minefield with only half a map. Tread wisely, walk carefully.

Your missteps will have equally historic consequences if you don't.

Steve Quick

Arlington Heights