"President-elect Obama said it so well last night, 'This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.' It's up to us to take up that challenge and urge Barack Obama to act on his deep commitment to women's health and reproductive freedom by reversing the global gag rule, restoring funding for UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, and acting quickly to overturn any dangerous last-minute anti-choice regulations that the lame-duck Bush administration may seek to put in place. We'll be asking for your help on these issues soon."
     From an email fund-raiser, written by Cecile Richards, President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Tomorrow I'll talk with you about items other than the outcome of the presidential election, such as the deeply regrettable passage of Washington's Initiative 1000 that legalized physician-assisted suicide. Today, I'd like to comment further on what transpired November 4 and your powerfully moving responses to yesterday's edition of Today's News & Views.

My morning was devoted to responding to some of the e-mails that came to NRLC and all of those which came to me. It was emotionally draining, of course, because people were writing in pain and anguish mere hours after the election of the rabidly pro-abortion President-elect Barack Obama.

But those same respondents virtually never finished their lament without adding a vow to redouble their efforts. You could almost see their faces set like flint, not ashamed of the cause to which so many have devoted their lives.

Almost always they told of extra effort they'd made to educate the electorate. It is always a great privilege to read such correspondence.

I've been involved a long time, so naturally I thought back to 1992, in some ways a close parallel.

I remember how crestfallen we all were when pro-abortion Bill Clinton edged out pro-life President George Herbert Walker Bush. And while I was told the office received a ton of phone calls, in the pre-Internet era, I did not have a personal sense of the grassroots' resolute determination until the letters began pouring in.

This time around I knew within a day and a half that overwhelmingly our people had taken about an hour to work through the loss of the pro-life team of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin before resolving that they were going to fight Obama and all the anti-life initiatives he will undertake up, sooner or later.

But you don't defeat an abortion-happy President and a Congress which has added to its majority of pro-abortion Democrats without thoughtful preparation. Rest assured you can anticipate this from National Right to Life.

I'd like to make two further points.

First, off to the side but crucial, is what we all anticipate will be the full-throated attempt by the Democrats to muffle/stifle/destroy the voice of talk radio. And, from their perspective, why not? To the likes of Senator Charles Schumer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, there are no real First Amendment concerns. How could there be when you believe, as they do, that free speech ought to be reserved for those who agree with you?

We don't have to rehearse the litany of studies that proved conclusively that the "mainstream media" and entertainment programmers bowed low to Senator Obama while trying to lay low Sen. McCain. The lone exception was talk radio. Under the guise of re-instituting the absurdly mislabeled "Fairness Doctrine," congressional Democrats are already vowing to effectively censor the lone holdout.

Second, our grassroots people forwarded our message of truth about Obama to the four corners of the globe. Inevitably, some recipients were not necessarily pro-lifers.

One wrote me Wednesday to ask not to receive any further email traffic. She quoted a line I'd written yesterday--"Obama will be a formidable foe over the next four years"--and said she found this "scary."

She could mean many things by this, but let me mention one. It is the sincerely held conviction that no one could possibly feel threatened by the policy preferences of President-elect Barack Obama, certainly not if they knew his "heart."

If you've read most newspapers over the past couple of days, the picture that emerges of Obama is that of a cautious man, a prudent man, someone whose biggest problem may be reining in the enlarged and hyper-active Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. Put another way Obama is a double blessing: he will not only keep a check on his own party's excesses but in so doing demonstrate that he is what he said he was all along--a reconciler.

Honestly, when they write this pap, the least they can do is include one of those disclaimers you see on television, assuring you that "any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional and purely coincidental."

I will not belabor what we've talked about here many times. Obama has no record of working with Republicans; the hands-across-the-political-aisle candidate was Sen. John McCain. (See Part Two, the review we ran of the book, "The Case Against Barack Obama.") In keeping with that history, Obama's choice as White House chief of staff is none other than Congressman Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic Caucus chairman.

If you were going to search heaven and earth (and elsewhere), it'd be difficult to imagine someone who less fits the profile of bipartisan than Rahm Emanuel. "He is smart and tough," writes Yuval Levin at nationalreview.com. "But he has been, in both positions [the Clinton White House and as a member of the House], a vicious graceless partisan: narrow, hectic, unremittingly aggressive, vulgar, and impatient."

My point is ridiculously simple but crucial. Being "open-minded" about a President Obama in general is one thing. To delude yourself into thinking he has not told us exactly what he intends to do to us and our cause-–sign FOCA, get rid of the Hyde Amendment, pump money into PPFA, the heart of the Abortion Establishment, for starters–is quite another.

That's not being open-minded. That's being empty headed.

Part Two -- Starting a Serious National Conversation About Barack Obama