by Lauren Haslett

Created on: December 09, 2008

Barack Obama was elected on November 4th not just because he has good policy ideas, smart and savvy people running his campaign (and now his transition), or because the vast majority of citizens of this country are dissatisfied with George W. Bush's haphazard attempt at governing. Obama succeeded because he was able to give voters all across this nation hope. Hope that he genuinely meant what he said on the trail; hope that he's intelligent, perceptive, diplomatic and cutting-edge enough to make some of those things happen; hope that he really does care whether or not someone gets to go to college, or whether someone who's worked for a now failing corporation for the last 15 years will get to keep their job (or at least walk away with a little something).

The word "hope" should have come to sound clich and irritatingly overused, hollow even, after the number of times we all heard it bantered about during the campaign, but the funny thing is, it hasn't yet. Barack Obama has given us more hope as a nation than any political figure in a generation, and he needs to give this nation reason to keep on hoping, if he's going to get any of his good ideas for changing this country off the ground.

In the past few months, we've gotten nothing but bad news and more bad news: the freeze of financial markets and a worldwide economic downturn, the mortgage and housing crisis, job loss, a broken healthcare system, climate change, and unending volatility in the Middle East are all problems this administration's going to have to face head-on. In order to achieve a truly transparent government, the incoming Obama administration will need to do plenty of hard work right from the beginning. This campaign was far more technologically-savvy than any that came before it, and Obama needs to make use of his youthful knowledge of the Internet and high-tech applications to regain the public's trust in government. He needs to continue to use his campaign's online resources to get people, real live American people, involved in their own government. The phenomenon of Obama's campaign is not just one of belief in Barack himself, but a movement of regular people finding new reason to believe in themselves, reason to believe again that if they write their senators or volunteer their time for a cause they care about, it will matter. What he has done with his online press conferences, going so far as to get what there is of his cabinet to respond directly to voters' questions, is a great start,

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