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Dear Mr. President,
Hello and welcome to Tampa Bay! All politics aside, it is always kind of neat when a president visits. This afternoon, some local folks are going to haul a big statue of you across a bridge over the bay, depicting you with your pants on fire, but I hope you will take that as a sort of, you know, parade in your honor.
Now, they say that you don't read newspapers, but I am hoping you might accidentally see the local rag while you're in town. (If you don't mind me saying, sir, it is really a bad idea not to read newspapers for yourself. I wish at least that you'd pose with a newspaper now and then, just to set a good example for the kids, you know.)
I suppose the main point I want to make is that most Americans are reasonable folks. They do not swallow everything the Democrats tell them - but they don't swallow everything that you're selling, either. Frankly, sir, it is wearing thinner than your folks up in Washington might be telling you.
Let's start with this debt business.
Listen, Mr. President, you are bankrupting the country. Everybody knows it. You just can't keep cutting taxes and claiming that one day it's going to rain Monopoly money out of the sky to pay for everything. Is this how you want to go down in the history books, as the Deadbeat President? If you think people aren't worried, you're wrong.
Here's another topic on which a lot of reasonable Americans absolutely disagree with you: the environment.
Your man Dick Cheney and his pals are way out of touch with the United States. Dick even said, back when he released his national energy strategy, that no "serious" person believes in conservation. Your friends still think that environmentalists are 1970s hippies.
But it's mainstream Americans who don't want to gut the Clean Air or Clean Water acts. Some of us even were paying attention when you gave that sweetheart break to the polluting power plants.
You will notice that I didn't mention Iraq first. This is because maybe Iraq isn't going to be the basis of most Americans' decision in November. It looks like you guys didn't really have the goods on Saddam, but nobody is boo-hooing for him to come back either.
One thing about Iraq, though: If I were you, Mr. President, I would personally greet every damned coffin. I would be standing right there at the airplane. Don't listen to Karl Rove if he is telling you to hide from that.
(Oh, and by the way, it's wrong to be a cheapskate with veterans' benefits at the same time you're waving the flag.)
Continuing in this spirit of constructive criticism, Mr. President, you are giving too much to the religious right.
It is getting tiresome to read yet another news story about some goofy Bush appointee somewhere who wrote an article about how the husband is the boss of the wife or how birth control is a sin, and that kind of business.
You are using your appointments to try to pay off the far right, and you know what? You will never satisfy them. Look at them now, ungrateful and grumbling because you won't lead a holy crusade against gay marriage. The heck with it. (By the way, you need to look at that stem-cell thing again. Honest.)
So much to say, so little space! Listen, not all Americans are as interested in alienating the rest of the world as your schoolhouse bully Paul Wolfowitz. You bragged that we don't need a "permission slip" to do whatever we want, but you know, it's not a sign of weakness to be neighborly now and then, either.
Basically, Mr. President, my take is that most folks think you're an okay guy who is trying to gloss over some bad acts. If you win in November, think about the long-term interests of the United States - and I don't mean the energy industry and the investor class. Listen to more Americans than just the ones who are telling you what you want to hear or the ones who your staff lines up for you.
Everybody who knows you says you are a great guy. If you have extra time while you're around and want to have a soda pop, give me a call. Didn't you used to say something like, just 'cause folks disagree, it doesn't make them enemies? The trouble is, Mr. President, everybody else working for you believes that it does.
Your friend, Howard