Left/Right Align Featured Image

I have seen about a million threads about this and it still doesn’t solve my problem.

I would like to left-align my featured image. I have the following code set-up within my loop:

<?php the_post_thumbnail('post', array('class' => 'alignLeft')); ?><?php echo $post->post_content; ?>

I have also tried the above code with the_content tag. The html that is spit out looks like this:

<img src="image.gif"><p>Text</p>

With the $post example, the p tags are removed.

What presents is this:

With the_content tag, the image is still above the text.
With the $post tag, the first line of text is aligned next to the image, but the rest isn’t and I lose all of the entry formatting.

I can’t post a link because of client confidentiality, but this is a common problem for which there is no answer/help. I’d like to unhook the p tag and maybe move it to before the post_thumbnail tag without removing all formatting.