The newly-launched change.gov has a section for citizens to share their vision for what America can be, and where President-Elect Obama should lead America. I decided to post this to their form:

While reading Robert Kuttner’s Obama’s Challenge several weeks ago, I was fascinated by his description of Denmark’s Flexicurity program, which seemed to both help the interests of free-market capitalism while simultaneously offering security to its country’s citizens. Rather than subsidizing failing industries, their government appears to give corporations as much free reign as they want to fire/lay-off employees, move workforces overseas, and so forth; they then offer a wealth of social services for people to recover from job loss through retraining. From the little I learned of it, this seems like a really great way to ensure an “agile” government that’s able to harness the innovation of capitalism while protecting the citizenry from its vagaries.

That said, Denmark is a small country with less than 10 million residents, not a world economic and military superpower with 300 million people. So I can certainly understand that this kind of model may not apply here, but I thought that it might be worth considering.

Not really a vision, more like a suggestion, and one that I imagine plenty of people in government have considered before. But I wanted to contribute something, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the new administration enhances the citizenry’s voice in government.

One of the most fascinating things about the Obama campaign was the way in which it was run: in some sense it mirrored the candidate’s desire to make government more participatory, because it was an extremely participatory campaign. There’s certainly good reason to be skeptical of Obama’s ability to lead, given his lack of experience, but it’s also useful to keep in mind the fact that the campaign itself is a trial of sorts that tests a candidate’s ability to act under pressure, to organize, and to construct a coherent narrative. In this respect, as numerous publications have pointed out, Obama’s team handily surpassed the competition, and he fully deserved the presidency.

Nothing reminds me how much I despise American politics as the presidential debates. Due to the context surrounding them—that is, the election—the candidates have an enormous incentive to focus on tactics directed at lowering the public’s regard of an opponent while improving one’s own standing, often through the use of misleading statistics and avoiding candid answers to questions. And as a result, rather than helping me understand the issues, the bickering between the two candidates usually results in an incoherence that leaves me utterly confused about the issues and saddened about our politicians’ ability to arrive at any kind of consensus.

Watching these debates does have its uses, but ultimately I think that there are much better ways to spend one’s election time. One of them is The Economist’s guide to the American Election, which cogently and concisely analyzes the stances of the Democratic and Republican candidates on a bevy of issues: the economy, regulation and trade, foreign policy, Iraq and Afghanistan, health care, immigration, energy and the environment, education, crime, and cultural values. As I’ve explained before, I particularly like The Economist because of its ability to coherently explain issues from a thought-provoking perspective, and in this regard their guide is a breath of fresh air.

This year’s Presidential election has me more passionate about politics than I’ve ever been. In part, this is because Obama’s campaign is more like a social movement than a political campaign: as Henry Jenkins explains in Obama and the “We” Generation, part of the reason that Obama’s message resonates so much with me and others in my generation is because of how participatory it is. His campaign isn’t about making him president and then having him magically repair our nation; it’s about working together, with his help, to make our country a better place. (That I’m drawn to Mozilla for similar reasons isn’t coincidental.)

To both learn more about this candidate and the problems facing our nation, I recently picked up a book called Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency by Robert Kuttner. I’m currently only two chapters into it, but it’s already been a thoroughly thought-provoking read, and one that heavily informs the rest of this post.

As educated citizens, we’re expected to know what the answers to many of our woes are. The world would be a much better place if only we’d have more government programs to help people in need—or alternatively, if only we’d remove more of those programs to ensure that people aren’t rewarded for laziness.

Are the answers to our problems really that cut-and-dry? Is deciding on a candidate really just a matter of looking at their voting history and their proposed platform and seeing how well it aligns with one’s own stances?

Certainly, that’s part of it, when it comes to issues that you’re truly informed on. The problem is, having a truly informed opinion across all the issues that face our nation is actually pretty hard. When I press myself for them, I’ve found that many of my stances come from simple arguments that are sometimes built on dubious premises. After following debates on important issues that face our world, I’ve found that most of them quickly become so mind-bogglingly intricate that they’re difficult to follow without a significant time investment. And investing that time becomes especially hard when one isn’t directly affected by the outcome of a problem, and even harder when one feels powerless to change it. Some issues, like the current financial crisis, are so complex that they still don’t make complete sense to people whose jobs it is to understand them.

This feeling of being simultaneously overwhelmed and powerless to change the situation isn’t comfortable, and as a result people often turn to other criteria to figure out who to vote for: criteria such as personality and character. It’s become conventional wisdom of late that using this as a basis for making a voting decision is fickle; liberals, for instance, laugh at conservatives who flock to Sarah Palin because she’s easy to relate to, or because she’s the kind of candidate that they could have a beer with or invite over for dinner.

I contend, though, that the instinct of such conservatives is appropriate. Abraham Lincoln once said the following:

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

It makes sense, then, that one should be attracted to the candidate that they’d love to have over for dinner; for if the public can’t relate to a candidate, and if the candidate isn’t effective at capturing both the hearts and minds of the people, how can he or she convince them of things that may be unpopular but are nonetheless the right thing to do? If you don’t trust a candidate at a gut level, how likely are you to believe in the promises they make?

Progressives often decry the concept of “truthiness” supposedly favored by conservatives—that is, the concept that you agree with an idea simply because it feels right—but ultimately it’s something that everyone, progressives included, fall prey to. And it makes perfect sense given how overwhelming the challenge of being a truly rational and informed human being is.

I believe that a great leader is someone who understands this concept enough to see it in themselves, and recognize that neither they nor anyone else has all the answers. They’re inquisitive enough to take advice from many conflicting perspectives, wise enough come to their own conclusion, and have the character to convince others that what they propose is the right thing to do.

In Obama’s Challenge, Robert Kuttner writes of Lincoln, drawing from the work of Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin:

First, Lincoln’s great challenge as president was not just to preserve the Union, or even to free the slaves. It was to win over public sentiment among what today would be called opinion leaders and the people generally. Lincoln gradually transformed how different segments of society thought about the problem of slavery, the challenge of rebuilding the Union, and the role of government in reconstruction and economic development. Out of impossible disunity, he built something close to national consensus.

The idea of “transforming how different segments of society thought about the problem of slavery” is something that Kuttner contends is quite like teaching. The best teachers are the ones who have the capability of showing their students not merely how to perform tasks or remember facts, but how to perceive a problem in an entirely different way than they did before.

For me personally, Obama’s capacity to do this is most convincingly evidenced by his A More Perfect Union speech, in which he responded to criticisms about his affiliation with a prejudiced pastor by making a profoundly compelling statement about racism in America that any side of the racial divide can relate to.

As Kuttner writes about Lincoln, such consensus-building takes character:

What made people his allies and admirers was not just his keen intellect and good humor. More importantly, it was his kindness, decency, idealism, and honor. He went out of his way to let people know that they were valued when he might have chosen to humiliate them.

That is to say, a great leader takes the high road. And while the Obama campaign’s advertisements and a few of Obama’s own actions have raised some questions about this, I believe that his character and the way he’s conducted his campaign is generally consistent with the qualities I’ve described so far. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything on his platform, I also don’t deny that my mind can’t be changed. Because just as I treasure my teachers for giving me new ways to perceive the world, so too do I long for a transformative national leader who can do the same for the American people.

Believing that Barack Obama has the ability to do this may sound a little far-reaching even to some of his supporters. Perhaps this is something I’ll look back on years from now and wonder how I could’ve been so naive, and the reality of politics certainly encourages such thinking. But at the same time, I wonder: if Franklin Roosevelt or Lincoln were running for president today, would we be able to tell? Or would we be so detached from the candidate’s character, so desensitized by cynicism, that we wouldn’t ever notice?

I’ve decided that I’m not a big fan of New York Times, or of newspapers in general. It’s not that they’re fundamentally wrong or anything, but as a source of daily information, it’s complete and total overload for me.

For instance, on the day after Super Tuesday, I wanted to read a bit about what happened, so I tried subscribing to a two-week trial of the online edition of the New York Times on my Kindle. I quickly found myself inundated by a torrent of information that, while perhaps useful to someone else, was useless to me; reading a sentence about how exhausted Obama and Clinton seemed during their speeches once the day was over, or a completely blasé quote from Hillary about how great it was that the American people came out to vote that day, was a complete waste of my attention. The relatively small size of the page on my Kindle, combined with the relatively large text size I had set it to, meant that there were entire pages in the article that had no useful information for me.

Like I said, though, this doesn’t mean they couldn’t be useful to someone else. Indeed, I’ve often found some NY Times technology articles that people have sent me, or articles that involve something I have a deeply vested interest in, to be genuinely informative. But as a whole, every issue of the NY Times is a vast morass of information that’s largely useless to me, and most of my time spent with it is used up wading through the irrelevance to find nuggets of truly useful information.

Fortunately, I’ve recently found an excellent alternative to the kind of information I want to get out of the New York Times: The Economist. It’s published only once a week, and isn’t nearly as large as a daily issue of the Times, let alone a Sunday issue. Its articles are relatively short, but very concise: the information density here is very high, meaning that almost every sentence provides me with something useful to think about. Using the reader’s attention like the precious resource it is, this magazine does an excellent job of informing someone about what’s happening and, more importantly, why they might want to care about it.