President Obama is the luckiest, most unlucky man America has seen since Washington. While he hasn’t needed to defeat the world’s largest empire in order to ascend to the highest political office in America, our new president has the exponentially daunting task of rebuilding (the superpower formally known as) the “greatest nation on earth.”So, the economy is being smashed to bits by the long-term side effects of NAFTA and globalization in general, and we’re all really strapped for cash, and jobs are becoming harder to find than the American Dream, but Obama may just have what it takes to at the very least, hold back the floodgates of disunion.

We collegiate Americans, sitting comfortably in our plush dorms and off-campus apartments, have been viewing this developing and madly escalating situation from a position of relative safety, secure in the knowledge that our hundred thousand dollar ticket should be enough. We see this maelstrom and do not fear what may follow, should our current American Dream fail to be enough.

The United States can remain strong, and has been able to weather most any storm, but with the economy as depressing as the Iraq War woes, our factional and partisan federal government may not be strong enough to remain united in this social contract. And that’s where Obama can (and must) do the most good.

Sure, he really needs to do something about the economy, and yes, immigration is certainly one of the top three items on the president’s Fix-it List, but Obama can get nowhere if he doesn’t have full-blown FDR-style support. And with his wildly successful Facebook campaign, President Obama has proven that we hoi polloi can be roused from our stupefying apathy to act.

The good will and full support of the American people is something very rare, but in our new president I see a man as capable as FDR, and as charismatic as JFK, without such a catchy abbreviation (frankly, BHO isn’t nearly as fun to roll off the tongue). But it will be these first tenuous months that will secure or destroy that support for America’s first black president, regardless of this initial crowning achievement.

One thing Obama has already targeted as a presidential directive is the dismantling of Guantanamo Bay. While this will most certainly take more than a hundred days, I believe he may have a multilateral solution at his feet.

First, Gitmo is “home” to quite a lot (personally I distrust any number the Pentagon releases to the media) of persons charged with aiding and abetting terrorism, along with scores of “enemy combatants” from all over the world. When Gitmo is dismantled, many of these cases will be headed straight for the US criminal justice system, which incidentally is already overflowing with harmless, non-violent drug-related misdemeanors, thus putting an immense strain on an already strained system.

The solution is simply to remove a large amount of pointless cases from judges’ dockets, so that these cases from Bush’s “War on Terror and Other Scary Things” are addressed.

The single biggest strain on our courts and prisons are marijuana-related offenses. Now, legalization is a tricky thing, and I doubt we will see that any time soon, but decriminalization and regulated medicinal legalization on a federal level is certainly more appealing and possible, considering the circumstances we now find our once-glorious nation in.

Imagine if three million stoners bought three grams a week at $20 a gram, America would take in $9.36 TRILLION a year. That’s $9,360,000,000 available thanks to a weed that is capable of growing in almost any condition. In one year, Obama could pay cash (the U.S. has been fighting in Iraq on borrowed money, by the way) for all our war debts.

Not to mention the other myriad benefits of cannabis, such an effort would require the government to begin production, which would create jobs and alleviate the social acceptance/criminal persecution paradox of the millennial America.

Now, I’m not a social scientist, and no, I haven’t conducted a census survey to discover how many Americans actually smoke that wacky tobaccky, but I’m quite positive that there’s a lot more than a paltry three million. Factoring out nutjobs and idealists, I’d wager that around half-that’s 50 percent, give or take ten points-of ALL traditional-age higher education students smoke SOME weed or have at least “tried but never inhaled.” That is certainly greater than three million.

My question is to you, President Obama: What are you going to do? We collegiate citizens stand ready, asking, what can we help you change?