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.

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:
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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".
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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.

Unfortunately, Brooks may be underestimating the problem. ( Read more... )

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.

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