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Only a few hours into his presidency, the mystic Obama aura is being felt far and wide. Like Elrond forming his fabled Fellowship of the Ring, bringing hobbit, elf, human and dwarf together under one banner, united in common cause to defeat the foul Sauron, so too has Obama's influence already started to bring together hereditary enemies. Israel hastened its pullout from Gaza. Obama recently embraced McCain as a brother and advisor. And most shocking of all, The Pioneer Press, as a charitable gesture to a fellow member of the fraternity of the screwed, will now help deliver the Star Tribune to far off Washington County and Wisconsin. Surely our new president's creeping miasma of congeniality will solve all mankind's problems - ushering in a new age of peace, love, and flying cars.

If only it were so easy. If only our new president could but snap his fingers, and like the messiah the millions of men and women who crowded our nation's capital today believe him to be, change water to wine and deliver us all from Bernie Madoff's sin.

But as all who don't read Dean Koontz are aware, the presidency is not that easy. Simple, perhaps, but never easy. After all, as Chris Rock says, there are really only two things the president is responsible for - peace and money. However, the last eight years have shown us that fucking those things up is easier than David Duchovny.

In reality, Pres. Obama now has to contend with two wars in varying stages of failure, two countries headed by megalomaniacs with delusions of relevance on the verge of becoming nuclear powers, and an economy that looks worse than Hotel for Dogs. Any one of these issues would be daunting. In combination, they're an argument for a thorough psychiatric workup for any man insane enough to run for the presidency. And to make matters worse, his worst enemies aren't hiding in the hinterlands of Pakistan planning a fiendishly clever assault on our nation's pork farmers hoping to plunge the U.S. into miles-deep depression when faced with a joyless bacon-free future. No, his worst enemies are seated in our own U.S. Congress.

With the popular mandate Obama and the Democrats in Congress received, in combination with the nigh-crushing weight of their majority, it's all too tempting for them to railroad the Republicans in Congress. For years the GOP lorded over the legislature, passing bills that were anathema to what the left imagined America to stand for. Now, to many of them, it's their turn. It's their opportunity to crush the thrice-damned right once and for all, consigning their ideas and ideals to farthest reaches of Utah and Alaska. And with the new president's mantra of change, the temptation would be to let it happen - to allow them to run roughshod over the right, ushering in an era of universal healthcare, education for all and hookers and blow in every pot.

Unfortunately, this utopian vision would quickly crumble, as the right and their supporters rallied against it. Even worse, the moderates who flocked to Obama's cause would quickly abandon it, seeing the administration go too far, too fast, without changing the tenor of debate in Washington as promised.

Luckily, despite the campaign rhetoric casting Pres. Obama as the most liberal of men and guilty of polygamy, bestiality, and the other assorted crimes against man and nature liberals commit on a near daily basis, one quality has shown most clearly in these transition months as our new president has worked to form his administration and gain allies in D.C. - he's the great conciliator. He's able to build coalitions of the unwilling and make their concerns his while not losing sight of the goals he hopes to achieve. For all the talk of his grand oratory, his vision, and his made for a monumentally crappy ABC Family rags to riches movie life story, his ability to bring his ideological enemies into the fold is the one that will serve him best as he tries to avoid the pyrrhic compromises that business in Washington so often entails.

And while his honeymoon with the American public isn't over by a long shot, it's quite certain that, as much as we may look forward to his first State of the Union address, when it comes to Obama, as Gandalf might've said - the time for words is over; the time of deeds has begun.