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What Obama's America Will Look Like
Charles Ommanney/Getty
How has the president-elect changed America? Start with the famous BlackBerry.
President Barack Hussein Obama, as he will be known by midday tomorrow, has changed everything about America already—and his epic battle to save his BlackBerry says it all.
When George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the precious possession he brought with him from home was his personal feather pillow. The theme of the Bush years was obliviousness. He was famously unavailable for debate and dialogue. He was deaf to countervailing voices. He hit the sack early and always got a good night’s sleep.
As we know by now, what the pillow was to Bush the BlackBerry is to Obama. Bush couldn’t wait to turn in; Obama can’t bear to tune out. It’s richly symbolic that the president-elect has been resisting the security agencies who’ve been trying to pry his fingers from around his beloved electronic device. He wants to stay in touch with the advisors and friends who can bypass the gatekeepers. (C u meet me at the g8 fr coffee 2nite?)
Bush couldn’t wait to turn in; Obama can’t bear to tune out.
It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama’s meager résumé—a mere community organizer!—before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama’s experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet. Those 12 million volunteers were literally conjured out of the air. Not only could he deploy his web army to distribute his leaflets, raise his funds, and sell his policy agenda, he could speak directly to them whenever he hit a snag. When he accepted the Democratic nomination in Invesco Field, tens of thousands held up their glowing mobile phones like candles at a rock concert.
But Obama was not just ahead of the curve in the way he understood the web. He was also the harbinger of a societal shift that is being played out now before our eyes in the current economic meltdown. He understood instinctively that the old structures—in his case, the structures of politics—had to be broken down and reassembled if we are to compete in the new world.
The same will prove true of business. The election delivered a seismic shock not just to the political world but to the suits at the top of Fortune 500 corporations. Call it the Obama Effect—a sudden hunger for creativity and innovation, a recognition that we have to be less massive and more nimble. It came too late for some, of course, as almost simultaneously we saw the sclerotic auto companies collapsing before us. The mantra of the next decade will be more consensual, less top-down, more cellular, less gigantic. Corporate communications will become a high-tech art just as political communication is for Obama. By the end of this new presidential era, every CEO who boasts that he has no time to use the Internet will be gone.
The new president’s biggest potential opportunity for cultural impact is to reverse the anti-intellectual atmosphere that reached its apogee under Bush the younger. Obama’s John Coltrane cool allows him to get away with being a nerd. Being brainy, being a wonk, is allowable when the package is lean and effortlessly hip, with serious eyes and a movie-star smile. Obama could make it fashionable to be book smart after years of Hollywood depictions of the kid in the class with straight A’s and his nose in a book as a hopeless loser. (There’s already a mini-cult building around his lead speech writer, Jon Favreau, who followed Obama from his Senate office to the White House and is all of 27.)
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Tina Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times best seller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.
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This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
What we, living outside US, realized last night is that the next 4 years will be more of the same
I just wonder : with the economy ruined isn't there a better way to spend all these millions?
I'm going to print this out and put it in a drawer. A year from now I'll take it out to re-read to see whether it was the Kool-Aid or the bubbly talking.
tina, your instinct at finding the heart beating in a story never ceases to amaze me!with a surgeons 10 blade you manage to slice through the peripheral nonsense of the same story reported by others and hone in on some unique facet that says it all.bravo..
Obama is the candidate of status quo, forced upon us by Wall Street and the media.
Can you say Bush Dark?
Lot of fluff here. Sorry, Tina !
Tina, you have never tried to understand America; you came over to tell us how it is, how we are, and how we ought to be. You are incorrigibly British--and although it is clear that you believe that to be the Best Thing anyone could possibly be, to someone acting as an analyst of America, it is PROVINCIAL. You destroyed the subtle wit and charm of The New Yorker and made it into a British, In-Your-Face, Slang-off America job.
Go Home.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
This is a great article.
Some of the readers are commenting on how Obama hasn't taken office yet, so how do we know how good he will be, etc. The fact is, Obama is bright, charismatic, literate, likable, wise, understanding and calm. This is what a president should be. Presidents are just as important symbolically as they are for practicality. George Bush isn't someone who unified Americans, he's someone who made us hate each other, he's someone who created more executive power than they should be, and last but not least, he was not wise, literate, calm, or charismatic. He only appealed to a small margin of conservative fundies in the first place. A president is more than anything a symbolic figurehead. They are also the commander and chief of the armed forces. If the commander in chief is someone only 20% of the population trusts, the results will not be good. As someone who appeals to the majority of Americans, we can unite to succeed in a common cause. Obama would never jump the gun the way Bush did with the Iraq war...and that is why he will be a great leader.
Finally someone has spoken the truth...Jaclynde props to you for pointing out all the other stuff Obama has going for him. White man in black skin please go take that racist crap and fall back in it....This world is going to change,if your on board or not. Maybe all of you haters will miss the boat. We here in Hawaii where the brown skin rules we all ready figured it out.... Rainbow children everywhere...
I don't see what's so British about a writer suggesting that change Obama is a refreshing change in style from his soon to be predecessor. I'd guess millions of the unjaundiced would agree..
Skorpio sounds like someone who got a poem rejected the by New Yorker when Tina Brown saved the slowly dying magazine .
Dear Tina:
I enjoyed reading this piece.
You might consider that the anti-intellectual elements of the society have eroded respect for culture so severely that words like "nerd" "braniac," et cetera . . . which in common parlance are most often used as pejoratives . . . get used even by some thinking people when they are referring to intellectuals.
Yet I am almost certain (and of course am thankful) that in published writing, nobody today would think to make similarly negative, even if jokey comments about handicapped people for instance.
When persons of cultivated mind speak among each other, they do not refer to each other as "brainiacs." A possible problem with using that kind of word at this juncture is that it encourages anti-intellectuals to feel validated in their negativity towards in-depth, rational thinking.
Just because Obama is President doesn't mean there are not still a lot of constituents . . . (who do at times put pressure on their representatives in Congress) . . . . that need to learn greater respect for the value of informed, clear-headed thinking.
At the very least, they should understand that deriding it is not acceptable.
not a bit of fluff, Tina. I think you nailed it... the only thing you left out was assumption that there will probably never be any 'back door' babes for the Dems to worry over towards scandal. I really loved the piece. Just great, and capturing a wonki Spirit of the moment..too. ta.
Of course, there are a large number of us in middle America who realize that we are witnessing the end of an era. Gone are ethics, morals, and the time to keep sleeping. Since the days of Madeline O'Hara, we have grown far too quite. If this isn't the time for the "real" moral majority to rise from the slumber and get America back on track, then there never will be. Back to work tomorrow, just another day. Oh, by the way, when are we going to eliminate the biased media?
Will the darling media and media darlings be at the top of this intellectual heap?
I wouldn't be too quick to say, "Out with the old." Obama's bound to be asking everyone to grab hold of those old values when he begins pushing the notion of "sacrifice."
Obama missed the chance of a lifetime. As a person who is half black and half white, he had the opportunity to be the first president from both groups. Instead, he chose to be a black president. While he may bring some people together, he could have brought more had he not made it "us" and "them".
A good piece. It reflects the excitement that I and others are feeling on the historical eve of the inauguration of this remarkable man.
And as for you gloomy naysayers and you right-wing haters--well, I truly feel sorry for you that you are all impervious to the good feelings surrounding this event.
Go Tina. Good job. I for one do not think this was a hope piece. It is a realistic prediction of what the Obama Presidency will be like. Yeah!
Bravo, Tina. I loved your pillow (Bush) and Blackberry (Obama)
metaphors. perfect pitch. What a pleasure it will be to have a President who is eloquent.
I loved it. Well said.
It not so much that he's a socialist, but that he hides it.
Anti-intellectual atmosphere? Please. Does she mean the Al Gores and Paul Krugmans of the world who refuse to acknowledge other points of view and well researched arguments? Examples:
Gore: "Te debate is over"
Krugman: "The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans."
How about Obama and Biden openly opposed to Gay Marriage, but millions of protesters blaming blacks and Mormons for the defeat of Prop 8?
How about the refusal by many in Congress to recognize that pro home ownership policies for all demographic groups led to a severe housing bubble and correction?
Barney Frank, refused to acknowledge problem in Fannie and Freddie in 2005. Do you mean that Anti-intellectual atmosphere?
Tina, after reading the comments here I see you've brought the right-wing rednecks out of the woodwork. I join you in celebrating the possibility of a new day in America.
In your dreams Tina. Obama or no, this is still a country where 25% of us believe we've been re-incarnated, 70% of us believe in angels, the earth was created whole about 10,000 years ago by "God", and a significant segment of us have never read a book in our lives. Having said that however, I have hopes for Obama. He has a first class intellect and temperament. I also appreciate his significance as the first black President. But I'm afraid rather than an inspiration for raising the cognitive bar for blacks (and others), many will see him as an affirmation that intellectual mediocrity of most American and African-American culture is sufficient. Rather than elevate the Corey Bookers of the black community as heroes, we'll continue to be saddled with the Maya Angelous, and "Brother" Cornel Wests as apogees of black intellectual achievement, and of course, those who excel in the stereotypical disciplines where blacks have had to perform in a true meritocracy -- sports and entertainment.
Thank you.
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