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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Question: What do Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, most American liberal journalists and international human rights advocates have in common?

Answer: They are all pinning their hopes and hearts on Barack Obama...

    * Medvedev wants Obama to "patch up" relations between America and Russia.
    * Geoffrey Robertson, author of Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, believes that Obama to "right the wrongs" of all previous American administrations.
    * 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."

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Barack Obama's democratic Internet strategy has just gone viral. The New York Times reports 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?

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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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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 1970's, 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."

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