Senator Obama,
You have made much during your campaign for the presidency of the need for a fundamental change in our political process. Your thesis is absolutely correct.

Let's have a discussion about your presidency. Not the first term or the first year or even the first 100 days. Let's talk about your first day in office.

On January 20, 2009, you will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. Your timing is, of course perfect, and your homage to my personal hero, Henry Aaron, is very much appreciated. Many have not understood your decision to run this time and your statements that you and Michelle have concluded that if you can't do it now, it makes no sense to do it later. But the message is clear. It is time to hit a home run for America!

So on your first day, set aside the revelry that your predecessors have indulged, the endless cycle of inaugural balls. Instead, proceed straight from the Capitol steps to a series of critical stage setting sessions with your cabinet and key stakeholders in various areas of American life. What follows is a simple but highly significant agenda, with all events taking place in faciities owned by the American people, most at our great Smithsonian Institution.

1. National Portrait Gallery: first cabinet meeting. Introduce the players to each other and their President, under the watchful gaze of those who have come before them. A little context setting to start things off.

2. Walter Reed Army Hospital: a discussion of our health care institutions and systems, with special emphasis on the care we fail to provide for our service members, veterans, and their families.

3. National Air and Space Museum: a review of the state of technology and science in the world and the place of the U.S. Serves as the jumping off point for a concerted effort to put the U.S. back in the lead in all areas of science and technology and ready to glean the economic value of that role in terms of new industries and quality jobs. (Sorry, wanted to do this in Arts and Industries but it just isn’t big enough.)

4. National Museum of the American Indian: a review of U.S. domestic policy regarding indigenous populations, voluntary and involuntary immigration, and advancement of all our citizens' abilities to compete in the market place. Sharp focus on the relative cost of solving labor shortages with H-1 visas versus using our own schools to bring the under-employed up to a point where they can fill the jobs. Internal promotion stuff.

5. National Museum of Natural History: an evaluation of global climate change, natural resources, dependence on foreign markets for critical elements of our economy, etc., and consideration of our environmental and recreational policies in close mutual context.

6. Sackler Gallery and National Museum of African Art: an examination of U.S. foreign and national defense policy and consideration of options for reviving our image in the world. The buildings themselves are a marvelous allegory for this journey, requiring the participants to journey underground to see the light.

7. Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: Consideration of the important role of the arts in our society, as immortalized in the copyright provision of the Constitution, and government’s policy to ensure a vibrant place for the arts in our society.

8. National Zoological Park: a meeting with Congressional and party leaders from both sides of the aisle, perhaps even a few of the fringe parties, for an examination of the political process in our nation and the fundamental changes needed in that process to ensure we are a nation of ideas, not factions.

9. The Castle: wrap up meeting of the cabinet, to report on the day’s events and to set an agenda for moving forward.

Sessions 2 through 8. can begin simultaneously, lead by the appropriate members of your cabinet, with you joining each session for a period of time, in sequence.

Set the tone, early, sir. We are depending on it.

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