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CROMER: Where Obama wants to go

By Mark Cromer | Thursday, November 20, 2008

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OP-ED:

As a beaming President-elect Barack Obama gazed out at the sea of Americans that had gathered on election night in Chicago's Grant Park to revel in his meteoric ascendance to the White House, the emotionally-charged triumph was awe inspiring.

Yet I couldn't help flashing back to another emotional sea of humanity - the one that three years earlier surged through New Orleans seeking shelter and salvation from Hurricane Katrina.

Despite the striking contrasts of hope and anguish, the promise displayed in Grant Park on election night verses the tragedy that unfolded in the Super Dome and all along the Gulf Coast in August of 2005, both flowed from a common well that now runs deep in America: the belief that the government can - and will - protect us.

Protect us from natural disasters, protect us from foreign terrorists and enemy states, protect us from a collapsing economy, protect us from street hoodlums, protect us from a dying environment and, ultimately, protect us from ourselves through legislation designed to blunt our lack of self-restraint and disinterest in self-reliance.

Indeed, in the passionate and emotional faces evident throughout the massive crowd that gathered to hear Mr. Obama's victory speech, there could be seen the reflection of the desperate faces that peered from the roof tops in New Orleans; of the stranded men and women holding up bed sheets with the word 'Help!' scrawled across them.

For all the soaring rhetoric that has greeted Mr. Obama's election and its historic implications for our nation, the underlying message from the majority of the American electorate is as inescapable as those bed sheets held skyward on the rooftops of a flooded New Orleans.

I hate to be a buzz kill this early at the party, but the bad news is that our young president is going to find himself stuck between a country that expects increasingly more from its government and a government that has a rapidly diminishing ability to deliver on those demands.

And that cold equation is going to loom large in the opening weeks of Mr. Obama's administration, as immigration again becomes an active policy issue, one that has the volatile potency to derail his domestic agenda in areas such as healthcare and education.

With his transition underway he is already under immense pressure from Latino groups to immediately suspend upon taking office the most successful efforts to enforce immigration law at the border and in the workplace, an action that would be seen as a metaphorical green light south of the border and trigger fresh waves of immigrants seeking to make landfall in front of an anticipated amnesty.