Karl Rove trudged down the corridor of the bunker, the steady click-click-click of his gleaming wingtips rising from the concrete floor to echo down the long, narrow chamber. When at last he reached the impenetrable doors to the undisclosed location, he paused for a moment, reached into his jacket pocket for a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his pudgy face and expansive brow. He took a deep breath and knocked.

Dick Cheney watched Rove's slow approach on the security monitors like a cat watches an oblivious mouse creeping along a baseboard. He had been waiting for Rove's arrival for days, but out of equal parts habit and spite made the boy wonder wait at the door a full two minutes before pushing the button that unbarred and slid open the double armor-plated barriers to entry.

"About time you got here, Turd Blossom" growled Cheney, "What took you so long?"

"I'm so sorry, sir, so sorry indeed," answered Rove, instinctively ducking his head and raising his arm slightly as if to ward off a blow. "It took them longer than they thought. And once they had the final production methodology I had to do my wedge issue calculations and voter suppression coefficients and factor them into the algorithms. And in my own defense, sir, you have kept me waiting out here for two full minutes."

"You're lucky I let you in at all after the way your last plan worked out," said Cheney with thinly veiled disgust in his voice. "All right then, come in, let's make this quick."

"Don't you want to see my PowerPoint?" asked Rove, disappointment showing on the clay features of his vacuous face.

"For God's sake, no!" groused Cheney. "You make me sit through another PowerPoint of your plans for world domination and I'll have you staring cross-eyed down the business end of a 12 gauge before you can scream 'Not in the face!'"

"Yes sir, of course, sir. It was terribly presumptuous of me to even ask. Very well, then," said Rove, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a brown prescription bottle. He and Cheney sat down on opposite sides of a small conference table, and Rove placed the bottle between them. "This is it," he said. "This is the stuff."

"What is it?" asked Cheney as he picked the bottle up and peered through his bifocals at the label.

"It's a dissociative neural inhibitor, but it has some incredibly unique properties," said Rove with a quick sideways glance. "I have it all in my PowerPoint. It would only take a moment for me to boot up and...."

"Hey, hey, hey!" yelled Cheney, leaning menacingly across the table, his sharpened canines bared behind taut, foam-flecked lips. "If you so much as mention your slide deck again, so help me God, I will have my assassination squad hunt you down, and when they finish with you I'll feed whatever is left to the snow leopards on my private hunting preserve.

"Yes, sir," groveled Rove, bowing his head in supplication, "Of course, sir, of course. Forgive my affront. This medication is a dissociative neural inhibitor with...."

"Dammit, Rove!" snarled Cheney, suddenly reaching across the table to put the architect in a headlock. "Hello? McFly?" barked Cheney as he rapped his knuckles repeatedly on Rove's skull. "I asked what it is, not what it does. Now what is it?" demanded Cheney as he released Rove and pushed him back into his chair.

"It's called Flummoxemal®," said Rove, rubbing his balding head and averting his eyes to avoid the pain of seeing the great man's displeasure with him. "It's derived from an extract of the Guatemalan bamboozle nut. It's a brand new formulation that the R&D boys at Eli Lilly Merck GlaxoSmithKline Bristol-MyersSquibb Johnson&Johnson came up with. Oh, that reminds me, they wanted to say thank you for greasing the skids on their merger, sir. Did you know there's never been a pharmaceutical company with a 96% share of the global market before? How did we ever survive it?"

"Just barely," Cheney grumbled, "and only because we're so damn self-reliant."

For a brief moment both men paused and pondered and nodded, and looking into each other's eyes they silently acknowledged their unspoken symbiosis, and one felt his fear and the other felt his loathing diminish ever so slightly before they both cleared their throats nervously and came to their senses.

"Okay, so this stuff is some sort of truth serum, or what?" asked Cheney.

"Not exactly, sir," said Rove. "In layman's terms, it blocks those brain impulses that identify and reconcile internal cognitive dissonance. One of those little red pills a day and you can tell people that north is south and east is west, and you'll actually believe it yourself. You could go on Hardball at eight and say you're completely opposed to stomping on puppies, and go on Hannity at nine and say puppy stomping is not only Constitutional, it's a God-given right."

"And I'd never give away that all I was doing was pandering? I could be completely convincing and nobody would be able to tell? I could actually come across as - sincere? Because, you know, I don't always come across as completely - sincere."

"As sincere as Obama, sir"

Cheney's eyes flashed with the hot ferocity of lightning.

"Hey, Bobby Hill, that's not something you really want to bring up with me now, is it? If your minions had done their jobs, McCain would have won, and I would have been his choice for vice president after the unfortunate but completely understandable, coincidental, and accidental death of Vice President Palin in a freak snowmobile explosion. The Cooler King would have buckled under the pressure in a couple of months, and then I'd be running things again."

"Yes, sir. Very right, sir. Terrible luck, that, what with the economy collapsing ahead of schedule and all. Timing those things can be so tricky. And who could have guessed those Wall Street rascals would be as efficient at incompetence as they are at greed? You have to tip your cap, they brought the whole project in months ahead of time."

"Yes, well, you don't want government interfering in the markets," Cheney said. "It kills incentive. We should make sure to give them a nice bonus for their enterprising spirit."

"Yes, sir," agreed Rove.

"Okay, so I know what this stuff is and what it does. But how does it help us?"

"Well, sir, I've devised a campaign strategy comprised of our most effective dirty tricks that, combined with judicious dosing of Flummoxemal® in your morning Metamucil, will virtually guarantee you victory if you run for president in 2012."

Both men paused a long moment to let the gravity and opportunity of the situation sink in before Cheney broke the silence.

"Okay, Rove," he said, pointing his finger and clenching his jaw for emphasis. "Just once, just this once I will let you show me your PowerPoint. But when you leave here today, you will never, ever mention this to another soul for as long as you live. Do you understand?"

"Oh, yes sir. Of course, sir," agreed Rove. "What happens in the undisclosed location stays in the undisclosed location."

"All right, then," said Cheney, setting the brown pill bottle down on the table. "Oh, just one more thing. How do we know this Flummoxemal® stuff is safe?"

"Well," said Rove demurely, "besides the usual prisoner testing, we've been doing a controlled study involving both the drug and a variety of semantically engineered and diametrically opposed test messages."

"Yeah?" asked Cheney, "Who are you using for a guinea pig? No, wait! Don't tell me, let me guess. It's Michael Steele, isn't it?"

"Of course, sir," said Rove, his hope once again kindled as he pulled the laptop from his briefcase. "Nothing gets by you, does it, sir?"

I want to tell you about a man who came from modest, even humble beginnings, a man who chased the American dream and caught it and wanted everyone to have an equal chance to catch it, too. A man who bore an unjust social stigma because of his minority and immigrant parentage. A man who experienced the sting of bigotry, but channeled those hurts into a personal quest for justice for other victims of injustice. A man of intelligence who excelled as an academic and professor. A man who got his start in politics as a community organizer, helping the underprivileged and disenfranchised find a voice, and rose through the ranks of government to achieve a seat in the U.S. Senate. Though many pundits and advisers told him he had little chance of winning, he contemplated a run for the White House as his ultimate opportunity to bring about progressive change and fundamental fairness to government and public policy. I'm referring, of course, to the late Senator Paul Wellstone.

Sen. Wellstone never made the run for the Oval Office he once considered, but he did share other similarities with President Obama. The most unsettling of them, sadly, has been a propensity to make rookie mistakes. For Wellstone, the first rookie mistake was breaching the protocol of George Herbert Walker Bush by having the audacity, as a newly minted freshman Senator, to expose his liberal agenda in a White House reception line. That was the famous encounter that led President George H.W. Bush, then the titular leader of the free world, to inquire of his neighbor in the reception line, "Who was that chickenshit?"

Never one to hide his liberal activist light under a basket, Wellstone next drew the ire of veterans early in his first term by holding an anti-Persian Gulf War press conference in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Republicans (and many conservative Democrats) were outraged and attacked Wellstone as if he were a stray dog that had lifted his leg on motherhood, apple pie, the flag and Lady Liberty. It was a dumb move, another rookie mistake, but one he took to heart and used as a learning experience. The backlash from his ill advised choice of press conference location ignited his interest in veterans' affairs, and Wellstone went on to become one of the most passionate and respected veterans' advocates in Congress, even earning the praise of Senator John McCain.

Fast forward nearly two decades and President Obama, now the leading voice for progressive change in Washington, finds himself embroiled in a series of controversies (some real, some manufactured) that in perspective are little more than rookie mistakes, the kind to be expected of any person in a new, unfamiliar position. But in today's highly charged partisan environment (and ironically right when quick action would be really helpful in overcoming an international economic crisis) very little is kept in perspective, and every step the president and his administration take becomes a tedious, agonizing walk through a political minefield, where every misstep is magnified and repeated ad infinitum through the media echo chamber.

Today the GOP faithful, eager deniers of health care to disabled and disadvantaged children, are hurling invective over President Obama's appearance on The Tonight Show in general and his unfortunate Special Olympics gaffe in particular. For good measure, they are throwing in that he should be dealing with the economy to the exclusion of everything else, especially college basketball prognostication. They have apparently forgotten what it is like to have a president who can walk and chew gum simultaneously. But all of today's bluster is almost a welcome relief after a full week of the hyped up drama that is the AIG bonus snafu. While President Obama's administration has accomplished much in the infancy of its first two months, it has also racked up its share of rookie mistakes.

When Paul Wellstone first arrived in Washington following his 1990 Senate win, he made a key rookie mistake that seriously handicapped his initial effectiveness in the Senate - he eschewed hiring Beltway insiders for his staff in favor of those campaign workers who helped win his Senate seat. But his loyalty to those campaigners, who were brilliant grassroots organizers, had unfortunate and unforeseen consequences. It seems grassroots organizing is a skill of meager utility inside the Washington bubble, and his staff's lack of insider connections essentially isolated Wellstone from the Washington web of influence. Wellstone eventually replaced many of his campaigners with more seasoned and better connected Congressional staffers, at no small political cost in his home state of Minnesota, where the move was criticized as disloyal and cynical. We Minnesotans are funny that way, though.

Fortunately, President Obama does not appear to be repeating this particular mistake. While he has pulled key people from his campaign into his administration, he's also incorporating a sizable share of veterans, people who know Washington and how it works and how to get things done - including former political rivals - and he's assembled an economic advisory team of financial wizards both macro and micro. In a relatively short time they have managed to begin laying the policy groundwork for President Obama's broader agenda for education, energy, health care, and diplomacy, what I like to think of as the American Restoration.

The good beginning is now in jeopardy of being irreparably overshadowed by the rookie mistakes, and the considerable political capital he now holds may begin slipping away unless President Obama is able to make the right adjustments. As dire as the economic situation remains, and as hell-bent on opposition and obstruction as the GOP is, and as adamant about business as usual as Wall Street is, President Obama's staff and Cabinet, indeed the collective resources of the executive branch, may not be enough to overcome the challenges we now face. For that President Obama needs more help than he can find in Chicago or Washington, D.C. For that he needs the people, from sea to shining sea. For that he needs a movement of involved, concerned citizens, the kind that got him into the White House in the first place, and the kind Senator Wellstone praised with these words at Iowa State University more than a decade ago, words that could have come as easily from an Obama stump speech:

" I do not believe the future will belong to those who are content with the present, I do not believe the future will belong to the cynics, or to those who stand on the sideline. The future will belong to those who have passion, and to those grassroots heroes who are willing to make the personal commitment to make our country better.  The future will belong to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. And if together we believe, we can create a movement like that which seized for women the right to vote, like the one that launched the New Deal, like the one that fought the War on Poverty."