An open letter to President Barack Obama:

Dear Mr. President,

As a woman who worked very hard to make sure your last opponents were not elected -- walking door to door in the snow on your behalf, registering more than a thousand Alaskans to vote, exposing Palin in the national media, etc. -- I feel obligated to write you about a few of my concerns.

Your secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, recently told reporters asking about Shell's drilling permits and Alaska's Arctic, "I believe there's not going to be an oil spill."

Sir, he just wrote the headline for the first oil spill under Arctic ice.

"I believe" is not good policy. I believe that unicorn fur is the most absorbent clean-up product.

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Where else might we apply the "I don't believe" analysis? How about: I don't believe I'll be in a car wreck so I won't wear my seat belt and I'll turn off the air bags. Really? No way. I'd be ticketed for not wearing a seat belt. Why? Because "I don't believe" doesn't prevent accidents. It's why we want every man, woman and child in this country to have access to affordable health care because "I don't believe I'll get sick" doesn't mean diddly.

Mr. President, you said, "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills" just 18 days before BP's deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. You were right; they "generally" don't. Oil tankers generally don't run aground on charted rocks. But the Exxon Valdez did, and Alaskans waited 20 years for the Supreme Court to finally award 10 cents on the dollar. When I walked across a beach in Prince William Sound two years ago, my boot prints filled with a sheen of oil. Generally, accidents don't happen, but when they do, it doesn't matter whether you believed they could happen or not. More than 200 million gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico. Two years later, the Gulf is still reeling, both ecologically and economically. There won't be a full recovery in my lifetime or yours.

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