"Hope" was a Great Campaign Slogan

Hope. 

Hope is good and it was the perfect message to send to a nation in 2008 that was experiencing a tough time.  We had been attacked on 9/11, the wars were not going according to plan, and the economy was slowing (due in part to Bush's increased spending).

But three years later, hope is not working as a governing policy.  Hope can only get you so far.  After all, we all have hope.  I hope that I can get out of Kentucky soon.  We all hope for a cure for cancer.  People hope to win the lottery.  And all good Tennesseans hope that Jake Locker will get the Titans back to a Super Bowl in the next 3 years.

But hope is only a belief rooted in faith.  I am not trying to diminish to importance of hope or faith.  Even God calls our attention to their importance.  But, in regards to national policy and how we are governed, hope alone doesn't work.

What we need more than anything right now is not hope but optimism.  Optimism is different from hope in that optimism is the belief and expectation that things will improve, if only you work for that improvement. 

"There's a joke President Reagan liked to tell that captures this spirit. One day a mother takes her son to a psychiatrist to see what could be done about the boy's extreme personality. It seemed that boy was too optimistic for his own good. So the psychiatrist led the boy into a room full of manure. The boy's face lit up and he immediately began digging through the manure, happy as can be. Shocked, the psychiatrist asked what the boy was doing. The boy looked up from his digging and replied: "With all this manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere!"

As his advisors would relate, President Reagan told this joke so frequently that it became a tagline of his entire presidency. Whenever something would go wrong, a staffer would repeat the punch line: "There must be a pony in there somewhere.

Like the boy looking for the pony, optimism is not a passive outlook. It takes action. Optimism contains within it an implied understanding: that the person who possesses it has real reason to believe that things will get better, meaning they are keenly aware of the world around them and possess a strong situational awareness. Their experience provides a track record of solving tough challenges using proven solutions."
( A Time for Choosing:Hope or Optimism by John Heubush/Forbes)

"Hope" was a great campaign slogan.  But now it is clear for nearly all to see that this president's version of hope doesn't provide optimism and give us real reason to believe that things will get better.

The only way to regain hope and optimism for this great country is to limit the current president and his administration to one term and then start to rebuild the future.