And so the Obama post-election brand is now becoming clearer. As the impressed David Brooks notes, it's the brainy brand - the senior Obama administration being made up, for the most part, of Harvard and Yale Law School graduates and Ivy League PhDs:
This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy - rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.
How is Barack Obama, America's King Solomon elect, going to make a decision on whether he should save or whether he should kill the American car industry?
This past week, mainstream American media has transformed itself into a debating chamber between the pro and anti Detroit lobbies. On Sunday's Meet the Press, we first heard a passionate exchange between Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Carl Levin (D-MI) on the long-term pros and cons of letting the American automobile industry die and then some valuably calibrated perspectives on this incredibly complex issue from Texan oil and wind man T Boone Pickens, Thomas Hot Flat and Crowded Friedman and Katty Kay, the BBC's Washington correspondent. The grown-up newspapers are also full of this debate. In the New York Times, for example, Mitt Romney wants something he euphemistically calls a managed bankruptcy; while yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Rick Waggoner, the CEO of GM, explains "Why GM Deserves Support".
David Brooks tells us that the cultural consequences of recessions are rarely uplifting and then goes on to suggest, quite rightly I think, that the next "big social movements" will come from the "formerly middle class", the victims of today's economic meltdown. I'm not sure, however, that Brooks quite recognizes the seriousness of the situation. For him, today's "recession" is about the formerly middle class giving up the affordable luxuries of brands like Coach, Whole Foods, Tiffany and Starbucks and finding their solace in "older, heavier, more reassuring" Playboy Playmates. For Brooks, today's situation is a standard economic downturn like the recession of the 70s and its cultural consequences have no special historic significance.
So Obama is already a lock-in
for Time magazine's 2008 Person of the Year. And that's before he
actually accomplishes anything. So what, exactly, will the guy do and how will
he be remembered in fifty years time? The rule in American politics is that
Presidents get elected because of the economy and then spend most of their time
focused on international affairs. With the good ship Hillary hopefully
on the team as Secretary of State, Obama will soon recognize the intractability
of the problems in Detroit and on Wall Street and will instead turn his
statesmanlike gaze outward, toward American relations with the rest of the
world.
Michael Hirsh pontificating about the failure of unregulated capitalism in this week's Newsweek, thinks Obama "job" is not only to to rescue the American economy, but also to save capitalism itself by acting "as a kind of cosmic broker between the end of one historical era and the beginning of another."
Barack Obama's democratic Internet strategy has just gone viral. The New York Timesreports that Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the leader of Israel's conservative Likud party, has borrowed the look, feel and features of Obama's website for his own site. Thus Israeli voters will have the pleasure of watching Bibi videos on YouTube, browsing Bibi's photos on flickr, getting invites from Bibi to join his Facebook network and receiving Tweets from Bibi on all the latest developments in the Middle East (including, perhaps, a cheerful Tweet about bombing Iran, after Bibi is elected to office early next year).
So who is next, I wonder? Which politician will borrow Obama's Internet strategy to give a little interactive jolt to their democratic standing?
In his provocative 2003 book, The Future of Freedom, Newsweek editor and CNN host Fareed Zakaria argues that the 20th century was defined by what he calls two "broad trends":
1) The regulation of capitalism 2) The deregulation of democracy
Both these trends, Zakaria, argues, "overreached". By the 1970s, he argues, capitalism was regulated to such an extent that the free market was taxed, licensed, controlled and nationalized to death. Thus governments spend the last quarter of the 20th century "deregulating industries, privatizing companies, and lowering tariffs." In contrast, Zakaria says, democracy has moved in the "opposite direction" to capitalism. Quoting John Dewey's ironic remark that the "cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy", he suggests that the "deregulation of democracy has gone too far." And that's why, Zakaria says, most Americans hate their politicians and why "public respect for politics and political systems in every advanced democracy is at an all-time low."
If you were President is the New York Times' attempt to crown everyone Obama for a few moments. We should be so lucky. In reality, the Obama Presidency will be a singularly top-down organization in which decisions will be made by him and his highly professional and experienced staff. Resembling his tightly run campaign, Obama's administration will sell the appearance of democratization through its use of direct email campaigns, personalized text-messaging announcements and intimate flickr photo spreads, but will actually be a highly centralized marketing operation, the first digital communications Presidency of the 21st century. As Monday'sWashington Post suggested:
Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly "wired" presidency... Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.
Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, believes that our 20th century global institutions are out-of-sync with today's 21st century political and economic challenges. He says that organizations like the United Nations, Bretton Woods and the G8 weren't up to recognizing and heading off the global financial meltdown and thus need to replaced by genuinely global social-networks of experts working both on and offline to solve the world's problems. In a Newsweek column ironically entitled "No More Top-Down Leadership", Klaus argues:
"What we need now is an entirely new global-cooperation system that capitalizes on technology, diversity and trust."
This is a top-down Davos solution for a world increasingly dominated by men like Schwab, the founder of the exclusive top-down Davos global leadership conference. He calls for the creation of 50 Global Agenda Councils for 50 different global challenges, each council made up of 20 experts selected by peer review. These councils, Schwab believes, will "depoliticize" the global problems by enabling the world's leading scientists, economists, artists, academics and business leaders to solve the world’s problems.
I was in the new/old East Berlin yesterday, speaking at an event organized by Deutsche Telecom. I flew out of London City Airport where I bumped into David Cornwall (aka: John Le Carre), who was signing copies of his new book, A Most Wanted Man. He was as one would expect him to be: handsome, courtly, charming. I told him that I wanted to write a historical biography of his fiction hero George Smiley and he appeared amused. Then I said that his third book, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963), is amongst my most beloved of books. The gentlemanly Cornwell smiled shyly, as if he'd like to escape his burdensome masterpiece.
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