Thank you Mr. Romney. Your concession speech showed real class, dignity and said what needed to be said regarding bringing America together again.
Now you have an opportunity to prove the pundits wrong and perhaps leave a legacy even greater than you'd have left if you had been elected. You are in the unique position of being the leader that reinvents the GOP and brings back the spirit and practices that made American Democracy a model for humanity -- a system that worked for the people and through civil discourse and honest disagreement we could grow, learn from our mistakes and move together as one nation. You could be the voice for unity and alignment in addressing the long list of divisive issues that are killing us.
This challenge requires leadership in bringing a whole new context for our political process into being -- a process of political collaboration. We need more than just rhetoric about 'working across the aisle'. We need to blur or eliminate the aisle altogether and transform our "win or lose" thinking into practices which acknowledge and reward creative solutions where different points of view become the raw material for generating policy transcends our differences. We need to recreate a vision for America in which includes all of us with no one left out.
It will take courage, humility and statesmanship. I was a possible voter until you began saying whatever people wanted to hear which you apparently found necessary to hold the support of fundamentalists in the Republican Party. Now after you're gracious departing speech I prefer to think that you are really the moderate that people followed in business, through the Olympics and into politics. I take you at your word when you said you "believe in America." If you, are at the end of the day, more committed to 'one America' that to the undeclared civil war raging in our country, then please lead by example and stay involved.
You can say to those in your party who only listen to each other and their unyielding ideology that they are now destroying themselves, their ideals and eventually their country by their very unwillingness to participate in honest dialogue -- to refuse compromise on virtually every issue. Even a novice observer can see the Republican policy of 'block Barack' at any cost -- and the cost has been the destruction of the "United" in the "United States." This must stop and you can stop it.
You, perhaps you alone, can acknowledge and reprimand the extremists on the right and the left for listening to and promoting factually inaccurate propaganda. You know the difference between honest marketing and dishonest manipulation of the media and constituents on both sides of the 'great divide' between the red and the blue among us. You can acknowledge your mistakes in 'buying into' the cynical notion that money can buy American voters. You are uniquely qualified to lead the reform of campaign financing and reign in the out-of-control spending of billions to undermine and destroy political opponents.
The cold war ended more because it became too expensive than the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. How long can we afford the commitment to putting this right versus left "pissing contest" ahead of common sense and resolving practical problems though honest discourse and allowing elected officials to vote their conscience and serve their constituents and not have policy be about a 'party line.'
Your willingness to admit mistakes and take a stand for America's future and for the Republican party could open the hearts and minds of millions of people on both ends of the political spectrum to pause and rethink their own recalcitrance and ignite the beginning of a resurgence of families and communities that have drifted into 'camps' of silent dissonance where politics must not be spoken.
You, Mr. Romney, can call for temperance and dignity and brotherly love in a nation whose greatness has become tarnished by special interests and short-term economic thinking. You can call on business to LEAD in finding workable compromise and to call for renewed values of putting God and country ahead of short-term returns. You can express the same kinds of leadership that brought efficiency to the top of the agendas of corporate boards and management teams to today's world where short-term efficiency in the interest of shareholders needs to be balanced with longer-term investment and effectiveness in the interest of all stakeholders.
In short, you have an opportunity to transform your loss of this election into a powerful and compelling example of leadership and humanity and statesmanship. As you know, the stakes have never been higher. You may not be the president, but you can be an elder for our nation and the world and help us to heal the polarization that has been growing like a cancer in us for the past 12 years. You have the opportunity to have this loss be a platform for speaking 'truth to power' and for showing us the 'real Romney' -- the man we saw on Tuesday - beaten but not defeated.