I've spent my most of my career as a sales and leadership consultant. That's a nice way of saying, I've spent two decades mediating turf wars, solving organizational problems, and teaching people how to get other people to buy what they're selling.

I also wrote a book about resolving conflicts. But more importantly, I'm a tax-paying, business-owning American who is sick of shelling out her hard earned money for less than great health care while my elected officials bicker about my children's future.

I can tell you right now:

The reason the Democrats are struggling to get healthcare passed is because they made the classic management mistake of trying to sell an initiative before they had widespread support for the inherent truths behind it.

One in three CEOs will be fired this year because of a failed change initiative. The reason so many leaders fail isn't because their ideas are bad; it's because they fail to effectively communicate why they're making the changes in the first place. Healthcare is no different.

The problem: The Dems tried to close the deal on the plan without fully communicating the core truths of the problem. The real issues have been camouflaged by months of muckraking and fear-based falsehoods.

The solution: Put the plan on pause and reframe the debate around the core truths on both sides.

Here's a simple, three-step process that Obama (or anyone else who wants to actually solve the problem) can use to reframe the debate, get the job done, and close the deal within the next 90 days.

Step 1. Get the truth on the table

Establish a finite (7 or 8, not 70) number of big-picture goals like no debt for next generation, maintaining a free market, the ability to choose your doctor, providing care to the currently insured, and eliminating pre-existing condition barriers. These core truths will reframe the dialogue and elevate the debate in a way that arguing the specifics of the plan never will. It will also easily reveal any lies that either side may be telling.

Note: If your core truth is that you want the other side to fail, you don't get to play.

Step 2. Sell the big picture goals to the American public

Selling healthcare to John and Jane Q Public is just like when the CEO tries to implement a new manufacturing process or a cost-cutting measure. You have to get people to buy into the goals before they will support an implementation plan. If you don't sell them on the need, all you'll get is bellyaching. (Exhibit A: Tea baggers. Exhibit B: Disengaged Dems)

Do a Ross Perot and get out the pie chart if you have to; the important thing is to communicate the goals clearly and succinctly, not the plan itself. The goals come first.

These first two steps should take no more than 30 days.

Step 3. Invite leaders to assess the current proposed plan against the agreed upon truths

Once you've established the core truths, you now have a framework for evaluating a plan (rather than endless debate). You can add, subtract, or revise as needed because all solutions are assessed against the big picture goals. Allocate thirty days for round one, thirty days for round two, and there is no round three. Blockers and their falsehoods will be quickly revealed, and the people working towards a solution will be rewarded.

Congressional tip: You're the middle managers of America, and we pay you to solve problems, not stymie solutions.

We might think that reframing a problem with a goals discussion will make the process take longer. But after a decade of working with major corporations and civic groups, I've found that a reframe like this actually shortens the debate time by at least 50%.

When you get the truths on the table early, you get better buy-in, and you eliminate the false arguments that polarize people.

The process I describe is simple, but it's not easy. As we've all seen, when the fear button gets pushed, people make all kinds of crazy assumptions.

But the current model of assuming bad intent and arguing over the endless details has taken months and months, and we're more angry at each other than when we started.

Do we want to continue the stalemate? Or are we ready to try a different approach?

Lisa Earle McLeod is syndicated columnist, author, keynote speaker and inspirational thought-leader. She is not an expert in healthcare or politics. She is an expert in helping people solve problems. Her latest book The Triangle of Truth: The Surprisingly Simple Secret to Resolving Conflicts Large And Small has been cited as a blueprint to "help smart people get better at everything." See- www.TriangleofTruth.com for a video intro.

Following up on my back and forth with Roger Ailes yesterday on ABC's This Week, Glenn Beck went on his radio show today and attacked what I'd said about him -- and, in the process, ended up spewing a lot more misinformation.

Beck's key point of contention was over my assertion that he had warned people that they were in danger of being "slaughtered" by the Obama administration and its friends.

Ailes had insisted that Beck had been "talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people, so I think he was probably accurate." Beck and his on-air partners, executive producer and head writer "Stu" Burguiere and contributing editor Pat Gray, tried to stick with that story.

BECK: I don't know that I've ever used the word "slaughtered." And if I used the word "slaughtered," if it wasn't in context of Mao, Stalin, or Hitler, it was in the idea that the truth is being slaughtered by this administration... not saying that the administration is going to slaughter anyone.

GRAY: Never, never.

Unfortunately for Ailes, Beck, and Gray -- but fortunately for fans of facts, reality, and the truth -- we live in the era of DVRs, YouTube, and embeddable video. And what Beck actually said is recorded for posterity.

Here is a rant Beck delivered on November 3, 2009 about SEIU's Andy Stern and the Obama administration (around the 9:30 mark):

And here's the transcript:

BECK: I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit -- there's one here, here, and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing. Because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees! Most likely, it'll happen sometime after Christmas. You're gonna see this economy come up -- we're already seeing it, and now it's gonna start coming back down again. And when you see the effects of what they're doing to the economy, remember these words: We will survive. No -- we'll do better than survive, we will thrive. As long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!

Not Stalin. Not Hitler. Not Mao. Not "the truth" being slaughtered. YOU. "They are taking YOU to a place to be slaughtered."

Chiding me on This Week, Ailes said of Beck: "I think he speaks English. I don't know. I mean, I don't misinterpret any of his words."

Well, if Ailes didn't misinterpret what Beck was saying (and if Beck didn't misinterpret his own words), I suppose that means they either weren't paying attention -- or they are willfully walking away from the kind of paranoid statements that have become Beck's stock-in-trade.

And, perhaps, we also misunderstood or misinterpreted what was being said this morning when Beck's cohorts had so much fun mocking the suffering of millions of people all across this country.

After playing a soundbyte of me on This Week, saying: "There's a lot of suffering out there..." Pat Gray jumped in:

GRAY: What is this "suffering"?

BURGUIERE: What's suffering?

I guess they missed that brief mention in the news about record unemployment, record foreclosures, record credit card failures, and the growing numbers of Americans going hungry.

That, Pat and Stu, is "suffering."

Finally, Beck asked me to explain why, in light of my criticism of him, I had invited him at last year's TIME 100 dinner to write a blog post for HuffPost.

First of all, let me re-issue my invitation. From the day we launched, HuffPost has always welcomed blog posts from people with whom we disagree, and preferred a full debate about the issues to just preaching to the converted.

At the same time, Glenn, as you would find out if you decided to take me up on my invitation and went backstage where our bloggers go to post, there are guidelines that have to be followed -- and they include a prohibition on conspiracy theories or inflammatory claims. So no post mentioning people being led to "slaughter" or being "the next victim" of an administration "killing spree." And no grand conspiracy theory in which you claim, as you did on your show back in August, to have deciphered a secret code proving that President Obama is trying to create an oligarchy -- although you spelled it "O-L-I-G-A-R-Y" on your chalk board.

These are actually very good ground rules for Fox News to adopt. I'll send you a copy and cc Roger.

For context, it's good to remember that Glenn Beck didn't come out of nowhere. He's the latest example of what the great historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics," which he defined as angry minds that traffic in "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy," and that see "the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms... always manning the barricades of civilization."

Sound familiar?

Beck preys on fear, political instability, and economic suffering, which, in turn, means that Fox News profits from fear, political instability, and economic suffering. The question I didn't get the chance to ask Roger Ailes is: you put Beck on the air -- would you want to live in a world in which Beck triumphed? In which his worldview won out? Is that a world you want your children to grow up in?

Ladies and gentlemen: you are witnessing the death of Rock 'n' Roll.

Consider this the obituary: from 2004 to 2008 album sales fell from 667 million to 428 million units, according to Neilsen SoundScan. That's a 35% decline in just four years.

Last year the Virgin Megastore chain closed the last of its two Manhattan music stores. With this announcement, Virgin is following in the footsteps of the venerable Tower Records, which shuttered its stores and declared bankruptcy in 2006 after amassing $200 million in debt. The Virgin stores were the last big-box music retail shops left in New York.

And don't look for the iPod to save the music business. While digital downloads have been on the rise, they haven't come close to making up for the decline in CD sales. Even after digital downloads are accounted for, total music sales declined more than 20% in the U.S. over the last four years. In 2008, the world's four major recording companies: EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner, posted record losses. Worst of all was EMI, which bled $1.2 billion.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry claims that 40 billion songs were downloaded illegally in 2008, and that 95% of all downloads were procured illegally, resulting in billions of losses. People haven't stopped listening to music; they've simply stopped paying for it. As a college student, I saw this firsthand.

Surveys indicate that more than half the nation's college students frequently download music illegally.

My generation's attitude toward piracy is not likely to change. After all, anti-corporate rebellion is a time-honored Rock 'n' Roll tradition. It's relatively easy to steal music if you imagine that you are merely stealing from 'The Man' -- some limo-riding fat cat, snorting coke off his Rolex, sipping Dom Pérignon.

By now, many people are familiar with the financial woes of the music industry. What isn't well understood, however, is how the economic misfortunes of the music business are transforming popular music itself, as we know it.

In the past, record companies often spent years and, in some cases, millions of dollars to develop each new artist. It took Bruce Springsteen eight years and five albums to achieve his first top ten radio hit.

Today, on the other hand, if a band's first album is not a hit, more often than not, that band is dropped from the label. No second chances. Most artists never turn a profit. According to Andy Karp, a top executive at Warner Music, "There are a lot of great classic bands that would have trouble getting a record deal now, like the Doors or others who didn't have their first hit record until their second or third album."

Labels are signing fewer artists overall. Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America estimates that the number of bands being signed to new labels has declined by a third. Who knows how many great artists have remained undiscovered as a result?

The digital revolution was supposed to empower musicians. On my own MySpace page, I can upload my own band's music to the web in a matter of minutes, and sell it to anyone in the world with an internet connection. Theoretically, it has never been easier to be heard. Yet hundreds of thousands of other musicians are competing for attention online. Winning new fans and staying connected to them requires tremendous marketing sophistication.

Without support from a record label, musicians must master the intricacies of search engine optimization, social networking, email blasts, and twittering -- not to mention traditional tasks like booking shows. Not surprisingly, many musicians lack such skills.

Can you, even for a moment, imagine Janis Joplin pouring over HTML manuals, or Jimi Hendrix spending hours each day spamming potential fans on MySpace? Not likely. Had those two tried to make it in today's marketplace, we may never have even heard of them.

And what if internet piracy had existed in the 1960s? No Dylan? No Beatles? Would Bono be working today as a longshoreman?

National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences President Neil Portnow made a plea last night during the Grammy Awards, essentially arguing that people should pay for music in order to support all the unknown artists out there who are trying to "make it."

In other words, it may not hurt Beyoncé or AC/DC if you download their music. They are, after all, astonishingly wealthy. But it does hurt the record labels, which, in turn, cannot afford to sign, develop and promote as many new artists. Consequently, our music is becoming less diverse. In the long run, music lovers themselves are deprived.

Today, fewer artists are being offered record deals; and new artists are being set aside if they fail to achieve quick success. As a result, the music of an entire generation is being muffled. Many of today's would-be Dylans and Springsteens remain lost in obscurity. We will never hear their songs.

Fans of my generation are killing the very thing they love. Despite the self-promotional tools of the digital age, artists today rarely achieve large-scale success without the promotional power of a major label. Yet, increasingly, record labels are unable to develop and market deserving talent.

And that is the real tragedy of the illegal downloading epidemic -- we don't even know what we're missing.

Earlier today, Jane Hamsher wrote a piece entitled "Big Banks: Unions Stopped Fighting, and the Entire Left Got Punched" in which she said that unions hadn't lead the way on the financial reform fight out of fear of upsetting the Administration. As someone who works heavily with both unions and other financial reform players in D.C., I don't feel this is quite an accurate description.

Sure there might have been some degree of hesitancy in the early days of the Administration. However, as someone who was heavily involved in the formation of Americans for Financial Reform, the bigger issue appeared to not be the "veal pen" syndrome effect ., but larger institutional inertia.

Financial reform is a complex issue that is the bastard son issue of the progressive movement that we all struggle to understand because of its complexities. Most of the resources and attention from big progressive organizations were focused on health care or climate change. I would argue that many progressive bloggers also failed to give the financial reform debate proper attention because they simply could not understand It due to how complex and boring of a subject it is to write about. Bloggers like DC organizations tend to go where the excitement was and it wasn't in understanding rewriting resolution authority rules, credit rating agencies, or creating exchanges for credit derivative swaps.

If an organization or a union had a staffer working on financial issues that staffer was typically splitting their time between other economic issues like trade, stimulus, etc like I was. Some unions hoping to get even more involved in the fight even released their retirement fund managers to work on the issue, giving them crash courses in Capitol Hill politics. Other organizations took labor guys like me with BA's in economics and gave us crash courses in financial regulation. There were simply just not enough qualified, available staff to work on this issue and there still isn't enough. We were rushing into the breach to take on bank lobbyists who outnumber us by a ratio of 30 to 1.

As National Community Reinvestment President John Taylor, a thirty year veteran of financial reform fights described it:

"It's like being in a street fight, and you and a few friends just went up against 100 other people, and you're just picking yourself up off the ground. And you're just bloodied."

Most staffers were fighting overwhelming odds against the big banks with very few resources and little coordination between other organizations. When Americans for Financial Reform came together last May, it allowed organizations to pool their resources and fight much more effectively. It was one of the most impressive efforts most organizers had ever seen, with dozens of organizations that can rarely agree on anything coming together in a month to draft 87 pages of in depth position papers. The unions played a key role in leading this effort happened with most of the meetings being at AFL CIO and SEIU headquarters

Since then, the unions have lead the way, organizing and providing the ground troops for the Showdown in Chicago and other actions against the banks across the country. Damon Silvers, the brilliant Director of Policy at the AFL CIO is the Deputy Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP that Elizabeth Warren chairs. He is one of the leading voices on financial reform often fiercely critical of the Administration. In a must see debate on financial reform earlier this year, the AFL CIO's Damon Silvers slammed the American Banking Association President Ed Yingling to the point of embarrassment. (Go here and see the debate, it was incredible!).

As someone who sat in the war room as we counted the votes on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), it looked like skeptical that the CFPA was going to make it out of the House. It did pass the House and I can tell you without a doubt that the CFPA would have never passed the House had it not been for the tireless efforts of local labor leaders to counter the political clout of community bankers in member's districts.

Finally when Barney Frank released "too big to fail" legislation that was deemed "TARP on Steroids", it was AFL CIO President Richard Trumka, the lone voice of financial reform who sat a table full of Big Banks CEO's in front of the House Financial Services Committee and testified against it. He characterized the plan by saying :

It appears to take the most problematic and unpopular aspects of the TARP and makes them the model for permanent legislation.

It was a historical event; no AFL CIO President in its history had even gone to testify against financial legislation. Not George Meany or Lance Kirkland who were far more interested in fighting Communists overseas than they were in fighting big banks or employers for that matter. For students of labor history, It was a sea change moment, a red letter day in the history of organized labor. AFL CIO President Richard Trumka has been the leading voice of the progressive movement on these issues, twisting the arms of Democrats behind the scenes to get them to push for tougher financial reform legislation.

While, I agree with Jane Hamsher's general sentiment that there has been an incredible lack of voices and attention on financial reform by the progressive movements blame equally shared by progressive bloggers, I do not agree that it is the fault of organized labor. To say that the unions haven't been leading the fight is a mischaracterizing of the historical role organized labor has played in this fight.

There is a strong (though by no means universal) consensus that if the Obama administration wants to make a serious dent in the federal deficit, it will have to let at least a portion of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011.

The task isn't always easy politics. No one wants to get tagged with raising taxes (especially during a recession), even if -- as the White House is proposing -- the rates will only go back up for those household making more than $250,000. But it gets a whole lot tougher when the media starts insisting that such a proposal constitutes a middle class tax increase.

That's what happened on Monday morning when White House budget director Peter Orszag was interviewed on CNN's American Morning with Kiran Chetry.

CHETRY: You also talk about letting taxes expire for families that make over $250,000. Some would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class.

ORSZAG: Well, I guess it's not the parts of the country where I've been. What we're trying to do is cut back on the tax breaks for the elite, for the very highest earners in part to help get this deficit problem under control over time and also to rebalance the tax code.

Orszag, of course, is right to be confused here. In 2007, the Census Bureau pegged that medium household income at $50,233.00. In 2006, just 1.5 percent of the U.S. public lived in households where the income was $250,000 or higher.

Beyond the fact checking, however, is the context. The White House has already passed enormous tax cuts for middle class Americans, as part of the stimulus package. And, as Orszag noted earlier in the CNN sit down, it is hoping to continue "tax cuts for middle class families and actually some expanded tax cuts for middle class families" going forward. The president has gotten far more criticism from Democrats for making those tax cuts a part of the stimulus than he has received credit from Republicans for their inclusion.

(H/T: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting)

Business and political leaders just gathered on the Magic Mountain hoping to beam up depressed financial markets. But the velocity of information is moving faster than the velocity of money and the fault may lie not in their stars, but in themselves.

Class warfare between capitalism and communism played out for 150 years and with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. crisis globalism is the eye in the triangle atop the financial ecosystem.

Without a rival economic system to challenge it, globalism now competes with itself. And, in the process of doing so, may be incubating its own enemy within.

Emerging from its cocoon with some help from the venture capitalists on Silicon Valley's Sand Hill Road, the brave new world known as social media seeks to the flatten the entrepreneurial focus of the emerging digital economy into a playground of blogs, tribes and conversations that reduce business from being the driver of market and oligopoly capitalism into an experience of stories, feelings and the wisdom of online crowds.

In the United States, social media tools like blogs, Twitter and fundraising websites helped Team Obama carry the banner of "Change You Can Believe In" to victory in 2008. Now, however, the White House is using social media to avoid a failed presidency and manage expectations downward as the US attempts to rebound from the economic crisis in the midst of a global credit crunch.

Social media is too new for slow moving government bureaucrats to regulate it, so its deceptive practices and bad actors get off easy with "guideline" status. Ethics and anti-corruption gurus like Lawrence Lessig don't go near that part of it . And since its all about advertising and marketing conducted in the form of conversations designed to shape consumer and business opinion about products and services there is no return on investment (ROI). Nothing is sold directly, therefore there's nothing to tax ... a big reason globalism likes it.

If you want to mobilize millions for earthquake relief in Haiti social media is a great tool. But the short attention span of social media Tweeple don't remember Bangladesh, a disaster ten times worse than Haiti that just had its 40th anniversary and hasn't recovered yet.

In the serial world of social media the next event will push Haiti off of the top slot on the Tweet Deck and social media users will be jonzein' for something new. One more reason why the American Psychiatric Association has classified a key group of online behaviors- like the games people play on Facebook- as addictions in the forthcoming DMS-V, just like heroin, crack, gambling and alcoholism.

The risk factor of assimilating the same globalist and American values that precipitated the current economic malaise is why nations like Brazil, China and France, with strong national infrastructures, have tough laws governing the internet. And its why social media advocates like US secretary of state Hilary Clinton interfere in the domestic affairs of China, accusing Beijing of not being open to Washington's concept of internet democracy. That's how the Opium Wars got started...

Major global companies like Pepsi and Ford are nurturing small budget experimental social media programs designed to promote causes and understand the consumer habits of younger generations. Social media's upside offers cheap, online advertising platforms at a time when companies and ad agencies are seeking to do more with less money.

Social media blogs and websites are also designed to capture data developed through online, debates, webinars and conversations. Bill Gates says the world should put less emphasis on developing cars that offer fuel economy and focus on low polluting vehicles that do less damage to the environment and cost $35,000. Broadening that discussion, Carlos Ghosn at Renault-Nissan and Ratan Tata of Tata Motors are talking about fuel efficient cars available now that help roll back the pathology of underdevelopment and cost just $4,000 in India, and elsewhere in Southern Asia. It remains to be seen if social media can earn its keep by promoting and managing a key sustainabilty conversation like this one.

Its a tough call because social media is having a problem exhibiting adult behaviors associated with mainstream business values. Social media is virtual and detached. From the viewpoint of behavioral psychology it behaves as an adaptive angry child, rather than as a stable, nurtured child because it is virtual and nobody nurtured it. Few social media companies have produced a steady, profitable bottom line or are reluctant to show it fearing regulation and higher taxes from the Obama administration. Those who provide the human capital that helps power social media blogs and websites sometimes work for free as interns, or for wages substantially lower than what basic jobs in mainstream advertising, public relations, and journalism pay.

What makes social media a radical subculture is that in the name of digital democracy, it assigns a higher importance to the feel good concepts of "social capital" and popularity than the monetary rewards that can help grow economies and build nations. Most social media blogs, websites and conversations are designed to be captured and read by machines, not humans, with the purpose of monetizing data provided freely when you click yes in a user agreement box. That data is mined by monitoring services who store it in a computer "cloud" and sell or trade it to other companies who use it an attempt to add value to products and services that they market via other channels.

Social media is not the huge e-commerce websites operated by Amazon, Wal-Mart, and others. Nor is it a part of the software industry that powers PCs, business, government and mobile devices. It is a social, not a business movement. It is dominated by Caucasians with the cultures of the Indian subcontinent well represented. African-Americans and Hispanics are at the bottom of the social media food chain. Social media is an elite trying to get over on the mass market. And right now, mainstream business is doing more to reach out and help guide social media than social media is doing to reach out and listen to business.

In contrast to the three martini, gray flannel suit world of Mad Men, the high noise to volume ratio of social media bears a striking resemblance to the unfinished cultural revolution that grew out of the 1960s.

The Mad Men of the 60's didn't get it so an underground press developed to service the big market gap. In San Francisco Rolling Stone emerged from the underground under founder Jann S. Wenner and developed a business model, reached across the Atlantic and put a global focus on cultural freedom and the notion that "the music will set you free."

Wenner became the Henry Luce of his generation by taking the road rage out of alternative media because he matured, listened and learned from the likes of Max Palevsky of Xerox and William Coblentz, who sat on the board of regents of the University of California. He patronized rads like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin while moving his enterprise to the center, creating a huge fan base without the aid of Twitter or Facebook that helped open the market space for MTV and later, digital music and movies. And with the Cold War still going full tilt, every kid with a sense of self in Pinsk, Plauen and Plovdiv hungered to listen to rock music and wanted a copy of Rolling Stone.

Social media has yet to find a visionary leader like Wenner. Proponents of social media say its all about listening and dialogue. But they tend to evangelize rather than educate. The same crowd wisdom that advocates flat corporate culture, win-win outcomes and kinder gentler conversations defaults to rockstar idolatry among its own politically correct leaders. Seth Godin, author of the popular book Lynchpin and other tomes, does not even bother to offer his flock of social media followers a place to comment or interact with him at his own website.

Where Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Linux software applications help people do business smarter, social media is time and labor intensive. Dell Computers, with a reputation as an aggressive, bottom line company, generated a paltry $6.5 million in gross sales through a social media program involving Twitter. The human capital required to grab that revenue, however, was 100 employees working over a two year period, each generating just $32,500 in business per year. Consistent with the hype surrounding social media, a Dell spokesperson characterized the program as "vibrant."

In their Davos video broadcast Edelman ranked the influence and credibility of social media below TV, industry analysts, and newspapers. Yet social media thought leaders and influencers behave as if their message is the key message. And as for the power and influence of Twitter, a recent study indicates that while Twitter has 75 million user accounts, a large percent of those are inactive, with about 25% of the accounts having no followers and 40% of the accounts having never sent a single tweet. Moreover, around 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than ten times.

If globalism wants to paint a positive image of itself, social media can be one of the colors on the palette, but not a primary color. Social media needs to grow up before living out its half-life like most other social experiments do or it will get co-opted by the globalist whale. Now, the self image of social media seems akin to a dog or cat looking into a mirror, touching and retouching the mirror with her paw because she has no sense of self.

In the dialectic between communism and capitalism, Lenin is said to have called creatures who exhibit this sort of anomie "useful idiots". Globalism hungers for malleable human capital and is flattening the personalities of people, national cultures and governments... who are globalism's "useful idiots?"

Dear Mr. President,

In April of 2007, you told David Brooks that Reinhold Niebuhr is one of your favorite philosophers. I was impressed at the time and still am. In re-reading that column from Brooks, I am reminded of the sincere, intelligent, yet powerful candidate who moved me and so much of the nation in the campaign.

When Mr. Brooks asked you what you took away from Niebuhr you said:

"I take away, the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism."

As you seem to be stumbling across the first anniversary of your presidency, I want to encourage you to find your inner Niebuhr this coming year, and especially reflect on his understanding of power.

Many people think of Niebuhr largely in the second half of his career, as the realist who took a hard line in foreign policy against communists. Some neo-cons consider Reinhold the patron saint of the hawkish perspective of confronting evil in the world outside American borders. Yet while "Reinny," as his students called him, did gravitate towards foreign policy in the 50's, his realism was born out of a desire for change right here in America into a radically more just society. (Remember Change?) Grounded in his Christian conviction, Niebuhr was a fierce advocate for the poor, and many forget that he ran for congress in 1932 on the socialist ticket. What we have come to know as a Niebuhrian approach to foreign policy was originally a strategy for domestic progress.

Niebuhr came out of the liberal 'social gospel' Christian tradition that he rejected - not because he disagreed with the movement's goal for social and economic justice - but because he felt that the theology of the social gospel was unrealistic and the means the social gospel suggested to reach a just society were naïve and ineffective. Instead he believed that only power would create change. Niebuhr wrote in the New Republic that liberal idealism "lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It's too intellectual, and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history."

You know all this about Niebuhr Mr. President - but didn't you fall into the liberal idealist trap?

You started off your presidency with a serious desire to reach across party lines and to unify our severely divided country. A wonderful sentiment, but a fatal mistake. You would never have been able to unify the entire country; you could only have taken advantage of the serious majority of opinion that you held. You spoke at your inauguration to hundreds of thousands who weathered the cold to be present on the Mall and instead of rallying us to the cause of Change which you promised; you spoke in serious tones about the work to come, and the need to come together. It seemed so right at the time. Your inauguration was not a time for one party or point of view to celebrate; it was time to come together. You invited Rick Warren to give the invocation showing your respect to white Evangelicals, almost none of whom voted for you - but they gave you little credit for the invitation of Warren. You let your Republican colleagues have their say on the important issues of finance reform, health care, and the environment - but all they said was "no." You kept out of the health care fray and encouraged the month of August to be used for Townhall discussions on health care - but the only people who were talking were carrying signs comparing you to Hitler.

Where you saw your actions as providing an opportunity for bringing our country together, Republicans saw weakness of resolve and blocked you every step of the way, never once voting with you on any domestic issue. The result is that you are starting your second term with a serious problem of momentum, and can expect no help from the Republican side (who always hoped you would fail), and only lukewarm support from your former supporters who really did expect more from you.

Mr. President, it is time for you to adopt a realist understanding of the depth of the power that is working to ensure that you fail. In one of his best known works, Moral Man, Immoral Society, Niebuhr argued that while individuals might act with self-sacrificing love, groups never willingly give up power. You are dealing with industries and political organizations who do not have your or the majority of the American people's best interests at heart. They have no intention in compromise, or reconciliation and it includes a group of fringe fanatics and members of congress who continue to spread the rumor that you are not American as well as play on fear of your race. Your opposition is serious and you have to be as well.

You have a great team who helped to get you elected and it is time to turn back on the heat. Many of us still support the policies you ran on and that you have proposed, it is time to get back into campaign mode, this time to pass legislation. Get out of the White House more, make more appearances around the country, no more last moment emails - I haven't opened an email from you since you won the Presidency - I want to see you out and about barnstorming for justice. Take Teddy Roosevelt as your guide - get out there and fight for what you believe. Your brilliant appearance last Friday with the Republican congressional representatives was the right start, but keep it going. Use ever power that you legally can to make sure that your presidency doesn't end with health care only for those who can afford it, financial structures that only benefit Wall Street, or environmental policies that will lead to world ruin. Fight the entrenched power of the status quo with the power of the people who elected you, and the power of the righteousness that comes from fighting for the "least of these."

No more Mr. Nice Guy. It's time for tough love. Take a deep breath, take the gloves off, and let us have it.

Congressman Engel (D-NY) has been a member of the U.S House of Representatives for 22 years. He serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee, including the Subcommittee on Health, and on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

He continues to be a committed champion of real health care reform. The day after the President's State of the Union address, I spoke with him and found him to still be inspired by the speech.

Kathleen Wells: Give us your thoughts about President Obama's State of the Union address?

Congressman Engel: I thought it was a great speech. I thought it was one of the best I've heard a President deliver. It was lengthy, comprehensive - touched on many different bases. I think he stood his ground, spoke from his heart, and he spoke the truth.

I really enjoyed listening to him. I think that he laid out, very clearly, that he inherited a fiscal mess when he came into office. The country was mired in a deep recession and slipping down a slippery path to a depression. Action that he engineered -- and the Congress went along with -- to prevent the country from slipping into a depression will take more than a year to get us out of the terrible situation we were in. And so we are still going to have to work, but we are on the right path.

And he laid the blame clearly where it was -- with the previous Bush administration. There were, as he called it, two unpaid-for wars.

When Bill Clinton left office, we had the largest surpluses in American history. And when Bush left eight years later, we have the largest deficits in American history.

This is what Obama inherited when he became President, and I think it was important to set the record straight.

I think that he talked about his priorities, which, of course, right now are jobs, the economy and unemployment. He made it clear to the American people that he heard the voters -- he hears the middle class with its frustration -- and he is acting accordingly. At the same time, though, he is not going to abandon his goal on health care, which is important, and education and all the other things that he campaigned on.

So, all in all, I thought it was a masterful speech; I thought he stood his ground; I thought he struck just the right tone.

He came across as a forceful leader, who is willing to compromise, willing to work with everyone, but is basically not going to step down from the things in which he believes and the issues that got him elected in the first place.

Kathleen Wells: The President mentioned that one in 10 Americans can't find work. I know that the House has passed a jobs bill. What are your thoughts about the Senate actually passing a jobs bill?

Congressman Engel: I think the President hit the nail on the head when he said that if we are now going to say that every important piece of legislation that comes out of the Senate needs to get 60 votes, it is problematic.

The Republicans have an obligation to explain to the American people why they essentially have become the party of no by saying no to everything and blocking every piece of legislation.

He cited two or three instances where the House has passed bills -- one of them was the jobs bill -- and where the Senate has not acted. He called upon the Senate to follow the House. And I think that was the right thing.

The Republican leadership likes to point a finger and say nothing is getting done. Well, it's not getting done because they've been obstructionists, and to a large degree they've succeeded, because as long as you need 60 votes to get anything through the Senate, they can block it.

Kathleen Wells: One of the overarching messages I got from the President's speech was when he said that he wouldn't quit. The President stated that Americans are asking why Washington is unable to solve any problems. Given this speech, do you anticipate anything changing with your colleagues on the other side of the aisle?

Congressman Engel: They have been emboldened, in my estimation, by their win in Massachusetts. They are going to attempt to make it tough for the President to get any of his initiatives through the Senate, for sure.

Kathleen Wells: So you think they are going to continue?

Congressman Engel: I think they will continue. Perhaps there are a handful of Republican moderates in the Senate -- less than a handful, but a few -- but the White House is going to have to bypass the leadership and talk to them directly.

And I think that [with] people like perhaps Olympia Snowe some agreement can be reached -- and a handful of others. The Republicans have pretty much decided that they want to block everything that Obama has wanted to get through.

Now, health care is another issue because the Senate has already passed their version of the health care bill with 60 votes. And we in the House, by and large, don't like their version. There has been some talk about having a new bill emanate in the House (which all financial bills have to start in the House) and pass the bill in the House, modifying/changing the Senate bill and having the Senate pass that House bill by a process called reconciliation, where you only need 51 or a majority to pass it.

If they were to do that, then ostensibly the House could then potentially pass the Senate bill with those changes. That is one thing that is being considered. It has not yet been decided whether that will be the vehicle. However, the President did say that he is not backing off on health care, and he should not back off on health care. There have been so many lies and distortions and mistruths about the health care bill, and what it really does, by the Republicans that people are confused. The average person is scared and doesn't know what he/she is really buying.

Kathleen Wells: What is the likelihood that using the process of reconciliation to pass the health care bill will actually happen?

Congressman Engel: I think the likelihood is quite good.

The vast majority of people on the Democratic side feel that health care needs to be passed and we can't delay. We can't push it back a year or six months. We need to pass it now.

What's probably changed, though, is that we need to also be sensitive to the fact that people out there are hurting, and if it appeared that we were doing health care to the detriment [of] everything else, then I think that was an unfortunate image that we may have projected. We need to make it clear that the economy, jobs, unemployment - those issues are our number one priority. And that health care comes along, but the pain that people are feeling out there -- middle America, middle class -- is really our first priority.

We can chew gum and walk at the same time - we can do both. Not do it either/ or - putting one on hold until we finish the other. We can do both, and we should do both.

Kathleen Wells: Do you think that's what the voters in Massachusetts were indicating with the victory of Scott Brown?

Congressman Engel: It is like any other election: there are multiple factors; it's not just one thing. But clearly that was part of it. I think that voters were confused and worried about health care reform, which is ironic because in Massachusetts they already have it and it wouldn't really have affected them. But I think that people just felt -- being aided and abetted with fire fanned by the Republican's misinformation... -- worried about what this would do with their future in terms of health care.

It was people who worried about the health care bill; it was people who were frustrated with the state of the economy and feeling that Washington wasn't listening to them. I think it was the fact that the Democrats had a terrible candidate, who was tone deaf until the very end and said all the wrong things and antagonized the people. I think it was the perfect storm; it all came together.

However, we are kidding ourselves if we dismiss the fact that in very blue Massachusetts, in Ted Kennedy's old seat, we now have a Republican sitting there. It's just unthinkable. And to think that was the 60^th vote for health care reform and that was Ted Kennedy's whole life's work! He must be rolling in his grave. It's just unbelievable that Massachusetts would vote that way, but instead of talking about how terrible it was, we've got to learn from it.

The President is attempting to do that.

Kathleen Wells: The President stated that he is proposing specific steps to address the one trillion-dollar costs that his administration has added to the deficit. Give us your thoughts on the spending freeze that will start in 2012?

Congressman Engel: I have mixed feelings about it to tell you the truth. We have got to get our fiscal house in order. But we have been dealt such a bad deal from the previous administrations (and I've already mentioned what the President said -- that there were two unpaid-for wars that were just going on and on - Iraq and Afghanistan - never paid for).

Everything we spent, in each of those wars, is adding to our deficit. We had tax cuts for the wealthy -- that's less revenue coming in -- so that contributed to the deficit. There was Medicare Part D, which was put in -- also an unfunded entitlement program - that certainly contributed to the deficit.

There were a whole bunch of spending priorities that were out of whack that the Republicans, who tried to portray themselves as people who were fiscally responsible, showed that they were anything but.

We really have to rein in spending and also do what we can to try and raise revenue. I know no one wants to talk about that.

The truth is we are not going to move towards a balanced budget by just raising taxes, and we are not going to move to a balanced budget by just cutting spending. There probably is going to have to be a combination of the two.

Cutting spending, of course, has to come first. Tax raising should not in any way, shape, or form be done to the middle class or working people. I believe those who are doing well in the society should pay a little more of their fair share. That's what the Democrats tried to do in the health care House bill, where we put a surtax on families making a million dollars or more a year to help pay for that bill.

We have to be careful not to raise taxes on the middle class - the ones bearing the burden.

When the President talks about a freeze on discretionary spending -- it's really a small portion -- it exempts military spending, it exempts Veteran spending - there are other things too - Medicare and Medicaid and health spending.

Looking at [the President's proposal], it freezes a small -- not insignificant, but somewhat small -- portion of the budget. And there are many programs in that portion of the budget that people like myself think are important. What we are doing, in essence, is isolating those projects, and we are saying we are going to freeze those but everything else is exempt. And I'm not so sure that that is fair and equitable.

On the other hand, we've got to start somewhere, and the President said it right and is making a good attempt to show fiscal restraint.

The Republicans still talk about cutting taxes for the rich, and I just don't understand how -- if we are in a terrible deficit now -- how cutting taxes for wealthy people, which means less revenue coming into the Federal government, helps you with the budget deficit.

I know they will say that will help to grow the economy and if the economy grows, then we can grow ourselves out of it.

Well, I think the President put it right when he said that these are the same failed ideas of the past eight years. They failed, and we wound up with almost a depression and red ink as far as the eye can see.

The Republicans are saying this is the solution to get out of this mess. Well, this was the solution that got us in the mess, so it's hardly the answer to cleaning up the mess.

The President said it last night, and he is absolutely right.

Kathleen Wells: Compare and contrast the Bush administration with the Obama administration.

Congressman Engel: As I said before, the Bush administration talked a good game about fiscal conservatism and minding the store, and their actions were the exact opposite. They spent more money than they took in; they never attempted to balance the budget or to fund what they were doing. They rushed us into two wars, without having the mechanism to pay for them, which meant that we were further in the hole in terms of balancing our budget. They put up Medicare Part D, which had some good aspects, but again, it wasn't paid for and therefore further eroded the balancing of the budget.

They gave tax cuts for the wealthy and, as I said before, [had] less money coming in, so we went deeper into debt.

It was that kind of nonsense, while talking about fiscal conservatism and fiscal restraint, yet they didn't practice what they preached. They ran this country into the ground. They ran the economy of this country into the ground.

Now we have Obama coming in and having to pick up the pieces. As he said, if he had come in at a normal time, then one of his priorities would have been decreasing the deficit. But he didn't come in at a normal time; he came in at a time when the country was going into depression and the economy was sputtering terribly. In order to fix the economy, he had to do innovative programs, which meant borrowing more money, which means going deeper into debt. But this wasn't of his choosing; this was what all the economists were saying: you need a jolt in the arm to get the economy moving again. He had to borrow and do stimulus packages and talk bailouts for the banks - which, by the way, the first one was done under Bush. You listen to the Republicans now, they make it sound as if it was an Obama program, but this is what Bush did/started.

The difference is that this President wants to start cutting back and moving towards balancing our budget. But he couldn't do it initially because [what] we had as the first priority was to get us out of the economic mess that we found [ourselves] in [because of] the policies of the Bush administration.

Kathleen Wells: I noticed that you spoke with the President after his speech. What did you say? And what was his response?

Congressman Engel: I told him that I thought it was the best State of the Union speech that I heard a President give in my 22 years in Congress, and he said to me: "Thank you, Elliott. I really appreciate that. That means a lot to me that you said that. Thank you."