You won, now what?

From Taegan Goddard:

Congratulations! The polls are closed, the votes were tallied and you came out on top! With the hard weeks of campaigning barely over, you must remember that the election was not the finish line, it's the starting gun. The tough job of governing lies ahead.

Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill may have said it best: "It's easier to run for office than to run the office."

The reality for today's newly elected officials and their staffs is little different than the fiction portrayed in the 1972 film, The Candidate. Robert Redford starred as an idealist running for U.S. Senate. He never worried much about his campaign promises, because he never thought he would actually win. So when he did, the candidate turned to his manager and asked the question the campaign left him completely unprepared to answer: "What do we do now?"

Like Redford's character, the winners of yesterday's election must now put their campaign promises into action. It's not easy because winning a campaign is very different than running a government. The elected and appointed officials swept into our governments after the elections may find it hard to get the simplest things accomplished. A different approach is needed.

"We campaign in poetry, but when we're elected, we're forced to govern in prose," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo once said.