As the author of an outrageously elitist booky-wooky which assaults our democratic cult of mass ignorance, I'm unabashedly thrilled by Obama's respect for the achievement of America's meritocratic intellectual aristocracy. His will be a truly anti-Palinesque presidency and, while it's not entirely clear whether he'll rule from the right or the left, what is clear is that the Harvard Law School graduate will rule from above rather than from below. But this does create a problem. That's because his pre-election brand was as much focused on YOU as on Obama himself. As Oxford University's Paul Temporal argues about the brilliantly successful pre-election Obama brand:

But, of course, Obama isn't a brand like a soap powder or a fizzy drink that exists simply to be bought, consumed and then forgotten until our next trip to the supermarket.  His pre-election brand have all been about making the voter as if they were in control. But now, with Geithner at Treasury, Summers at the White House, the Hillary show rolling into State and the rest of his Harvard-Yale dream team taking up their positions, Obama's post-election rule-from-above brand doesn't quite gel with the pre-election rule-from-below brand. So there needs to be a recalibration of the message. To rule effectively from above, Obama must explain that politics is a profession rather than a moral calling and that he's assembled the intellectually best and the brightest amongst us to fix America. In contrast with the plebeian populism of the Joe-the-Plumber crowd, Barack the President needs not only to rebuild America's infrastructure but also to rebuild the value of the skilled policy-maker as the heart and soul of the political process.

Originally published in Andrew Keen's blog The Great Seduction. Read Andrew Keen on Mondays in the media section of the paper - independent.co.uk/media