No matter how you frame it, San Francisco, and I mean by that Silicon Valley and the whole Bay Area, is an amazing place to be right now. Set aside the success of the sports teams, though that would have been nice icing on the cake. In the areas that really matter most for the world right now and going forward for the next couple decades, this region pretty much can’t be beat. If you had to pick one city, one region in the world right now, as ground zero for the reinvention of the new systems needed for the 21st century – it would have to be San Francisco.

Take the 3 core areas of fundamental transition that America and the world are going through right now. In each of them, this region seems hard to beat as the place to be:

The Digital Transformation: There’s really no region remotely comparable when it comes to where the action is in the ongoing Digital Revolution. It’s really quite astounding that almost every tech company of significance is based here. True, Seattle has its Amazon, and, I guess you would still have to include Microsoft. They are the outliers that prove the rule. And there is the occasional important tech company outside America. But if you are interested in how technology is remaking and will remake the world, you come here or you visit very frequently.

The Global Transformation: By definition, many places in the world can claim to be part of the globalization of everything story. But there are few places outside the United States where you get much of a cross-fertilization of cultures and nationalities. And within the United States, there are few places that could beat California in that category. Silicon Valley and the whole San Francisco Bay Area in general right now is creating a huge sucking sound as they suck in talent from all corners of the world. It’s quite remarkable the balanced blend of Asia and Europe and Latin America that you find here. That polyglot is especially valuable when heading into an era where many systems are increasingly going global.

The Sustainable Transformation: The clean tech industry may have lost some of its luster with the recent stampede into new natural gas opportunities. But clean tech is playing long ball, and it’s inevitable that this area is only going to grow and play an increasing role in providing the energy of the 21st century. Watch as the continued droughts and bizarre weather (and the renewed emphasis from the Obama Administration) continue to raise the profile of this sector. Plus, energy tech is just one facet of the whole sustainable transition. There are many other industries in the economy just beginning to redesign their products and services in more sustainable directions. Much of that work is also happening in the Bay Area – though to be sure this region does have its challengers outside the US.

There’s all kinds of other reasons that the San Francisco region is such a happening place to be right now. I’ll give just a couple more and stop before I alienate too many people from the east coast.

Millennial Influx: San Francisco has always attracted young people, but it’s becoming a Mecca for the Millennials right now. The Mission District, the neighborhood most known for young people, is booming. Literally 20 new restaurants have opened up on the Valencia strip in the last few years. The rental market is white hot as young people stream in from all corners. This gives the city an especially interesting buzz since the Millennial Generation has such a wonderful constellation of characteristics, such as a can-do optimism, civic-mindedness, and collaborative ethos.

Progressive Resurgence: San Francisco has always had its “progressive” politics, but for many years the ideas were old school and politically correct. Not very exciting. Now there’s a new sense of blending technology and policy, with hip groups like Code for America becoming the darlings of city officials. Moreover, California itself seems to be entering a new era where progressives are getting freed to think big and swing for the fences. All elected statewide officials are Democrats, and both the state House and Senate have Dem super-majorities. The Republican party, long dragged to the right by conservatives, is decimated right now. The public just last election voted to tax themselves, and especially the wealthy. Partly because of that, the state budget is now balanced, public confidence rising, and the economy gearing up.

All these pieces taken together point to an amazing opportunity for reinvention. We’re pleased that Reinventors is rooted in this city and region ( and even that young Mission District). We hope to bring many of the diverse and eclectic thinkers and doers who have collected here into the group video environment for our Roundtable series as we stream out for anyone to see. The beauty of this new medium of group video is that we can connect up like-minded people doing great things in other parts of America and the world and virtually bring them to San Francisco too. Let the reinvention begin.

 
I was on the lawn in front of Obama, within sight of him, when he delivered that passage above, and his Second Inaugural Address, and I could not have agreed more, or been happier that he delivered it.

Obama gave a full-throated argument for the next phase of progress in America, which will be based on the next phase of progressive thinking, or, in my terms, a reinvention of progressive ideas to fit the new realities of the 21st century.

He stepped back and explained to all America and the world the case for the progressive tradition in American politics, starting with the core ideals, dating back to our founding documents, that all people are created equal. We’ve spent the last 30 years or so in American politics elevating the value of freedom, of individual freedom. Now it’s time to balance that with the equally important value of equality. Obama did that.

Obama used the address to further make the case for collective action, for working together to achieve goals that each of us alone simply can’t accomplish. He constantly used the word, almost a mantra, “together,” to emphasize this truism that many of us have seemed to forget.

He also used the address to tee up some of the biggest unsolved challenges of our time – like climate change. Here was a topic that was pretty much ignored in the campaign yet in this speech he devoted the most time of any issue to making the case why we simply must act now – not just for us, but for future generations.

What made me most happy, though, was that he didn’t pretend to have all the answers, or claim that the old ideas of the progressive tradition could solve these new challenges. He talked about the need for widespread innovation in the years ahead and literally talked about the American people’s “gift for reinvention.”

“America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it so long as we seize it together.”

Let’s just unpack that money quote: The passage alludes to the fundamentally new borderless global world we now inhabit that forces equally fundamental changes in our systems. It recommits to the core values (progressive values) of openness and diversity that constantly generate us. It’s got a can-do optimism that welcomes the future, and the progress that we can make as we move into it. It celebrates youth and change, innovation and risk – yet it reminds us that we can only pull this off if we work “together.”

The entire speech was terrific, and I expect it will stand the test of time. Even David Brooks, the conservative pundit who is always intellectually honest in his analysis, called it among the best in 50 years. Clearly Obama wrote this one with his legacy in mind, which means he’s teeing up a more transformative agenda for his second term. It’s totally worth a full and close reading, but I’ll point out a few of my favorite passages:

I love how he plays on “re” words like remake and revamp and reform with the meta point that we have to redo almost everything to carry out our core values and ideals:

“We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. We must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work harder, learn more, and reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American. That is what this moment requires.”

Obama makes the common sense argument for why we have the safety net that many seem bent on destroying – because misfortune can hit anyone and everyone needs the confidence to take risks:

“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity…We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any time, may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm.

The commitments we make to each other: through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

Obama finally makes the connection to today’s extraordinary natural disasters and talks about climate change through the historical lens that our era surely will be judged:

“We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.”

The guy who took down Osama Bin Laden and is on his way to concluding his second war can finally steer foreign policy back to the more peaceful approach of diplomacy – an absolute necessity for our more globalized future:

“But we are also heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends, and we must carry those lessons into this time as well.

We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law. We will show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations peacefully—not because we are naive about the dangers we face, but because engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear.”

And Obama resuscitates one of the central planks of 20th-century progressive (what many call Liberal) foreign policy that had been abandoned since the time of Carter:

“And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice—not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.”

Obama explains much domestic policy in terms of carrying out the logical extension of what it means that all people are created equal:

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

And then he builds on that long tradition, and lays out the next agenda for domestic policy that we must carry out today:

“It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law—for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.”

Obama then ends with a call for urgency and for doing the best we can with what we know for now:

“For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.”

Obama’s Second Inaugural speech was everything I could have asked for, personally, and as the founder of Reinventors and the host of the Reinvent America web series. The last four years was mostly about pulling the country out of a financial and economic crater, and extricating the country from two wars. Obama accomplished a lot beyond that in the first term, but he wasn’t able to fully shape his own agenda. He also made mistakes and learned a lot in those four years too.

Now Obama is heading into the next four years with a big, bold, potentially transformative vision. He’s ready to roll – and we at Reinventors are ready to roll with him. Let the reinvention begin!

Peter Leyden

Steven Johnson’s terrific new book “Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age” puts a stake in the ground and does the best job I’ve seen to define that political mentality and even coin a new term for it: “Peer Progressive.”

Like me, Johnson says he spent years trying to make sense of  the worldview not only of many of those he knew in the Valley, but also in circles on both coasts and in urban hubs. They appreciated markets for their efficiency and they appreciated the need for an activist government too. Yet they were wary of how markets often led to big, centralized corporations, and how government often ended up with big, bureaucratic solutions as well.

Johnson points out that there is a third way, a fundamentally different way to organize things through peer networks, which are radically decentralized networks of equals. People involved with the Internet watched how the digital revolution forced reorganizations of whole industries and fields around this network model and so it deeply influenced their thinking on how civic sectors and society as a whole ultimately might be reorganized as well.

So that accounts for the “peer” part of the concept. How about the “progressive” part? This does NOT refer to what often is labeled as progressive in conventional politics today. Those classic progressives are actually hanging onto the progressive ideas of past generations (defend unions at all costs, etc.) and often are deeply suspicious of change and pessimistic about the future.

Johnson uses the term “progressive” in a more generic way as in: people who believe in progress and are open to change and often optimistic about the future. He also uses it in a more historical way as in: people who are more aligned with the core values and more concerned with the core constituencies of the progressive tradition as opposed to the conservative tradition in American politics.

We’re in the muddled early stages of defining this new political mindset and of reorganizing society around this peer network model. So much of the book is devoted to early cases of this fundamental reorganization and this new mindset at work. As a former journalist, I particularly liked his chapter on how that field has been transformed along these lines. The conventional wisdom often is that society was better served by old media (which was the big centralized 20th century kind) while Johnson makes a very compelling argument that society is already better served by the new media, the exploded, bottom-up model of blogs and amateur involvement in providing information – and certainly will be in the near future.

Johnson does a decent job of trying to give some shape to how government might work very differently in his chapter on “liquid democracies.” He does the same in the economic realm with his chapter on “conscious capitalism.”  But this is a short book and his aim is to just provide a starting point for much more rigorous and thorough thinking to come.

I couldn’t help but view the book through the lens of the Reinventors series that we’re just starting over at Reinventors.net. In our terms, Johnson is describing the early stages of the reinvention of progressivism itself. This long political tradition has gone through several reinventions: around the Civil War period, around the so-called “Progressive Era” of the early 20th century, and again in the 1930s around the Great Depression and WWII. It’s long overdue for the next one, now.

The book also describes one of the core reinventions that inevitably must come to almost all fields and sectors: the redesign of all the hierarchical, bureaucratic systems of the 20th century into the network models of the 21st. The pioneers of that inevitable transformation are the “peer progressives.”

This is why Steven Johnson will be one of our first (if not the first) remarkable reinventor to kick off the roundtable series. His topic will be Reinvent Progressivism. You can find out more about it here.

And I expect we will have many more “peer progressives” in the roundtables, whether they identify that way or not. I hope they do grab onto the label. This term could well be a catalytic agent that pulls together many like-minded people who are toiling away in their own little worlds with little understanding of how they fit in the whole. When enough of them come together they have the potential to shake up the political status quo and help bring about some of the big changes that must come to create a more perfect future.

In the previous blog entry posted before the election I laid out the unambiguous choice that Americans faced this election between a conservative or a progressive way forward. In the Presidential contest as well as all the Senate races, this choice was crystal clear and the results are now crystal clear as well. America made a clear decision on Tuesday to turn from the conservative worldview that Reagan ushered in 30 years ago and that was characterized by the campaign slogan “It’s morning in America.” They clearly decided to begin a new era, but this time, a progressive one.

Don’t for a second listen to the media or Republicans who try to spin this election as anything but a rejection of that conservative agenda and the embrace of an emerging progressive one. The only possible place that you could begin to make the argument that the country is still evenly divided is in the results of the House – but even there the results fit into this broader narrative of an historic progressive shift. (I’ll explain that further down.) Let’s look at the overwhelming evidence:

• Obama took the presidency with 332 electoral votes. We had to endure a year of everyone talking about this as going to be super close or a toss-up. (Even the hallowed pollster Nate Silver pronounced that Obama was “toast” in a New York Times magazine cover story in February this year.) In fact, in electoral college terms, it was not close. Obama took every state he did in his historic first election with the exception of two of the most conservative ones: Indiana and North Carolina (though that state was pretty close too). He also handily took the popular vote by about 3 million votes despite all the predictions that he would not.
• The Democrats won 25 and lost only 8 of the Senate races. This is extraordinary given how vulnerable they were with the extremely lopsided number of seats they had to defend going into this. For two years all the politicos could talk about was how the Dems could never hold onto their majority in the Senate. In actually, they increased their numbers by two to hold a 55-45 advantage.
• All the statewide ballot measures that posed a big choice between conservative or progressive options went the progressive way. The most notable had to do with gay marriage – from Maine to Maryland to Minnesota to Washington. People clearly decided to go with the flow of history and get on with it. But even marijuana was legalized in Colorado and Washington. The just-say-no era is done.
• The California results are instructive nationally too. California elected Democratic super-majorities to both their Houses for the first time – which means that the Republicans in the chambers can’t do their knee-jerk rejection of anything having to do with taxes.  (All tax measures must have 2/3 majorities.) And Californians overwhelmingly voted to raise taxes on themselves and even more on their affluent fellow citizens to finally deal with structural deficits. I often say that California is the future – it often prefigures what comes to other states years later. If so, the conservative Republican brand is decimated. They hold zero statewide offices and less than one-third of the seats in the legislature – because they refuse to let go of the conservative dogma that simply does not play anymore in this dynamic, diverse state. Which brings us to…
• The Hispanic and other racial and ethnic demographic results. The coalition that backed Obama is the future, pure and simple. He got an extraordinary 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, and Hispanics defied the skeptics and turned out in large numbers – pushing their percentage of the electorate to 10 percent. He took an even higher percentage (73 percent) of the Asian-American vote, which, granted, is much smaller in absolute numbers than Hispanics. He took 93 percent of African-Americans (which may not be surprising, but is significant in numbers) and 58 percent of all other racial and ethnic minorities.
• The Millennial Generation vote. Obama took the vast majority (60 percent versus 36 percent) of the Millennial youth vote, which also defied all those who said they would not turn out. They did – with those age 30 and under coming out in even higher percentages than the 2008 election, from 18 percent of all voters in 2008 to 19 percent this year. In fact, about 23 million young Americans voted, a full 50 percent of those eligible – significantly higher than previous generations of young voters.
• These demographic developments are huge game-changers for long-term politics. (I’ve long argued this, including in this 2007 Mother Jones magazine piece.) Obama is locking in these two constituencies to the progressive side and both will only grow larger and more powerful in the coming decades. They are the constituencies that can sustain transformative change over the long haul. The conservatives have nothing remotely comparable. In fact, they are becoming the party of aging white guys. Which brings up…
• The women’s vote is Democratic and progressive – and they’re half the country. All the results support this. Obama’s share of the women’s vote was 11 percentage points above Romney’s. The Democrats consistently put forward woman candidates: Democrats will add 4 new female senators from this election, and 10 of their winning 21 senators were women, making women 30 percent of the Dem senate caucus – and all but a handful of the 20 female senators are Dems. The new House will have 61 female Democratic representatives, compared to just 21 female Republicans. And that’s not even wading into the public relations disaster that conservative senate candidates stirred up with talk of “legitimate rape” and the like.

The results of the House on the surface don’t seem to fit into this larger narrative of the electorate’s shift away from the conservative worldview to a more progressive one because the Republicans did hold onto that chamber. However, there are several factors that explain this in my view:

• Democrats running for the House received more votes in total than their Republican counterparts (half a million as of this post), if you factor out unopposed canddiates from either party. So if you just go with the popular vote in more of a national referendum, the Dems won.
• The difference came down to gerry-mandering. The Republicans held a big advantage in drawing the new lines of the Congressional districts after the 2010 census. Many of the Republican-controlled state legislatures did a masterful job of maximizing the seats they could reasonably expect to win. That proved to be a structural advantage that could not be overcome even in a wave election like this one. For example, take states that Obama the Dem won but that were aggressively redistricted by partisan Republican legislatures: in Ohio, only 4 of 16 districts went Dem, in Pennsylvania, only 4 of 16, in Virginia, only 3 of 11.
• However, it’s worth noting that a redistricting strategy like that could backfire in the coming cycles. There is a big downside to maximizing the numbers of seats you take after the census because the margins you build into those districts are enough to work that year (say 55 percent versus very safe 65 percent), but might not be enough to hold for the whole decade of demographic changes that often comes in this churning country of ours. A cycle or two later, the risks are higher that you can lose those seats. We’ll see how this plays out in 2014 and 2016.
• The big outside PAC money did matter at the Congressional level. Obama could raise the money needed to counter the super PACs. The high-profile statewide Senate races could do the same. One of the under-appreciated things that will come out in the final financial reportings is that the bottom-up aggregation of many middle class contributions did reach the scale needed to counter the billionaires. Obama is the master at this, and the high-profile Senate candidates became extremely good at it as well. However, they needed to draw off large bases of $30 to $250 contributors to aggregate enough money to do the job. For example, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads operations raised $390 million from their billionaires and other high net worth people who had no limits to what they could toss into the hopper. You need millions of small contributors to counter that. At the Congressional level, you simply can’t draw off a big enough grassroots base. So when those Super PACs dropped $1million into those races, as they often did, it was extremely hard to counter.
• The Democrats did gain at least 7 seats in the House in this year to get to more than 200 (some are still being sorted out), just not enough to retake control of the House. In some places, like in California, Democrats gained at least 4 seats. The new Democratic caucus (61 women, 43 African Americans, 27 Hispanics, 10 Asian Americans) will more closely reflect the new demographic realities of the country and will likely continue to attract people from those growing constituencies in the years ahead.
• Nowhere did conservative candidates make gains. In fact, many of the most high-profile Tea Party conservative House members got taken out:  Allen West, Joe Walsh, Chip Cravaack, Frank Guinta, to name a few. Dan Lungren is trailing his opponent as of this post. And Michele Bachmann barely hung on by 4000 votes. It’s going to be hard to put any kind of positive spin on that backlash.

The Republican party is now going to enter into a phase of serious factional warfare. You can already see the positioning happening in the post mortems coming off the election. The most healthy outcome for the Republicans and the country at large would be to see this election for what it was and get on with modernizing a more moderate, or dare I say, more progressive vision for the Republican party. Republicans have a long tradition of progressive politics – think Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, to name a few. And through the 1960s and 1970s they had large numbers of moderates. They could move back in that direction and still hold onto core party principles and values.

My prediction is that won’t happen for a while, though. Hardcore conservatives are so entrenched in the party apparatuses at all levels throughout the country that they will prevail over any efforts at moderation for years to come. I think many of them will conclude that Romney was not conservative enough and they will double down with more of the same for a cycle or two. Eventually, like in a decade or so, a more progressive vision for the Republicans will come to challenge the progressive ideas on the Democratic side.

So a new era is beginning in American politics. Americans have made their choice about the direction we will now head. Now comes the hard part of figuring out the solutions that will be informed by those progressive values and concerns but that will also actually solve the very real challenges that lie ahead. Now it’s reinvention time.

The last time we made a choice of this magnitude was in 1980, roughly a generation ago. America chose to move in a more conservative direction and away from the tired old formulas of what was called a liberal era, the mid-20th century label for the latest manifestation of the long line of progressive thought. Those once-vital liberal (progressive) ideas dominated American politics from the 1930s through the 1960s but started losing their effectiveness by the 1970s.

The 1980 election of Reagan ushered in what has become a 30-year run of conservative thinking dominating American politics – even affecting the way Democrats like Bill Clinton thought and worked. That basic conservative worldview has some basic components that are very different than the comparable components in the progressive worldview. The conservative worldview can roughly can be summed up like this:

• Core Values: Liberate the individual and maximize freedom now.
• Core Constituencies: The rich and affluent more than other sectors of society because they are the engines of economic growth and dynamic change.
• Role of Government: Government is mostly bad because it’s bureaucratic, inefficient and constrains the individual and vital economic actors.
• Role of Markets: Markets generate much of what is good in society and are central to solving most problems – so keep them free from constraints.
• View of World: It’s dangerous out there and filled with enemies so we need the most powerful military to defend and promote our interests.
• View of Planet: Climate change is debatable and the environment is mostly doing fine so don’t let those concerns interfere with human activities.

Romney, despite the moderate roots of his family and time in Massachusetts, has grabbed that conservative standard and put himself out as its champion. Paul Ryan, his running mate, is the poster child of the very ideological right-wing Congressional House. And the Republican party at almost all levels has purged all those who stray from the conservative orthodoxy – moderates or rare Republicans progressives (who used to have substantial numbers).

So the choice is clear on one side of the ledger, from the President all the way down through Senate, House and state level offices too. Do you want to extend the 30-year reign of conservative thinking that has stretched from Reagan through George W. Bush? If there is a distinction today, it’s just to apply the old policy formulas with more vigor: cut taxes, cut regulations, cut government programs, beef up the the military, drill for more oil, etc.

On the other side of the choice is President Obama. Set aside all the distracting side issues about how he debated, or whether you personally like the guy, or whether the unemployment rate should be a tick or two lower – the stuff that most political coverage is about. From the big-picture, historical perspective, Obama represents the very different progressive worldview. You can run down the same bullet points as above and get very different answers:

• Core Values: Look out for the whole group over the long-term.
• Core Constituencies: The middle class or working class, with a lot of concern for the poor, as opposed to the affluent who will always fare well.
• Role of Government: Government is mostly good because it’s an effective way for us all to take collective action and make common investments.
• Role of Markets: Clearly a great engine for prosperity but when left to itself it creates great inequalities, excesses and abuses – so it needs channeling.
• View of World: As the world shrinks we should mainly think of other nations as partners – not enemies – and use the military only as a last resort.
• View of Planet: Our natural environment is becoming very stressed and climate change is very real so societies need to quickly become sustainable.

One problem with this straight-up comparison of “The Choice” is that those embracing the progressive worldview have not developed a full set of ideas and policies for how to carry out those progressive values and priorities in the 21st century. Obama and the Democrats certainly have a distinct set of ideas from the conservatives – we see that in the clash in the debates. But quite a few of those ideas are from the old 20th century liberal playbook (don’t touch social security, etc.). Some of the ideas put forward (more investments in clean energy) are in sync with the new realities of the 21st century. But we need many, many more ideas and eventually policies that are up to the true challenges of our times.

This time delay on the full set of policies is totally to be expected in this phase of a generational political cycle. We’re in the early stages of a shift in the political ballast of the country. The 2008 Obama election started making that shift, but generated a huge backlash from the conservative side in the rise of the Tea Party and the 2010 midterm elections. (Just like the 1980 Reagan election generated a huge backlash from the progressive side that complicated his first term.) It will take another 10 years or so to generate the full slate of progressive ideas and policies that are up to the task of trying to transform the country. (Just like we did not see the full blossoming of conservative ideas until the Gingrich revolution in the 1990s and George Bush and his neo-conservatives in the 2000s.) Change at this historical scale takes time.

For now, the country is faced with The Choice. This is not a choice between a clear set of policies, but rather it is a choice about a fundamental way forward. It’s about the core set of values, about the core principles, about getting the worldview right.

To me, the choice is clear. Obama and those in this progressive current of thinking are much closer to having what it will take to transition the country into the 21st century. We are moving to a world that ultimately is going to be all digital, fully global, and needs to become much more sustainable. Those embracing that second set of bullet-points are going to be much more apt to get us there – and get all of us there and set up to thrive over the long-term.

I think a majority of Americans know this in their guts even if they can’t articulate it. That’s why this election people will turn away from the last good look at that conservative path, and they will pull the lever for Obama and give him a second term. And because The Choice does not just refer to the top of the ticket, I think we’ll see a lot of down-ballot repercussions as well. In other words, I expect the Senate will remain controlled by Democrats (despite the lopsided number of seats they have to defend), and I think there’s a good chance the Dems will take the House.

When Obama wins again, the Senate stays steady and even if the House margin just tightens up, the message will be clear. America will have made a choice. We will know which way to go forward.

Now Koreans can rightly claim to be the hipsters of Asia. Their Samsung is kicking butt on Sony and even trying to challenge Apple in the world of high design. The entire country of 45 million or so are blazing a trail for the high bandwidth lifestyle of the 21st century. And their pop culture is dominating Asia and now seeping to other parts of the world.

Witness “Gangnam Style,” the hip new music video that has about 350 million views and charting. It is the product of a very sophisticated sensibility. That video could not have been made 25 years ago, or even 10 years ago, or maybe even 5 years ago. But the Korea of today can create that sensation, and there will be many more.

One of the interesting things about Korea is that it was heavily influenced by America – more so than Japan or China. So they have this interesting blend of American creative individualism as well as the more conventional Asian attributes in their culture. That mix helps create this video. If you haven’t watched it, enjoy:

The talk itself was terrific and put a twist on a topic of  increasing interest to many people: what happens as computers continue to get increasingly powerful and connected up. Much speculation has gone into artificial intelligence and the so-called singularity when computers might become smarter than humans. O’Reilly talked not about artificial intelligence but collective intelligence. What happens when all the humans on the planet get connected up and augmented with powerful digital tools. He talked about a new kind of “man-machine symbiosis.” If interested, check out the podcast when it posts.

However, I was just as interested in O’Reilly as a “reinventor,” the kind of person who we expect will provide anchor interviews and stimulate roundtable discussion over interactive group video in a new project to Reinvent America being put on by my new company, Reinventors Network. (If you want to find more about that new effort check out the section on this website called Startup.)

He seemed astounded, as am I, that with all the monumental challenges that our country faces, and all the evident trauma as our world restructures helter-skelter towards the 21st century, the campaign conversation is so, well, small and petty. Friedman writes off Romney, as what you’d expect, but he chides Obama – you’re better than this.

To Obama’s credit, he does frequently frame the election as a huge choice of how America goes forward. I agree that given the two paths currently presented, the consequences of this election are huge. But Friedman rightly calls for Obama to give a much more full-throated vision of what America can begin to do in a second term.

Friedman also gives Obama credit for much of what he did in the first term as good steps in the right direction, but Friedman complains that Obama keeps pulling short of tying them all together in a grand narrative that can inspire the electorate to band together and move ahead.

Today David Brooks gave his version of what he calls the Dullest Campaign Ever. I often think of Brooks as the conservative side’s Friedman. They both are intellectually honest and more committed to being American than partisan. And so they often present two sides to the same civic coin. In this case, Brooks is just as exasperated with how intellectually stagnant this campaign is. He then riffs off the various reasons why our politics have come to that.

This Reinvent America project I’m working on is situated in the place that both Friedman and Brooks are groping for. We can’t expect politicians, even very talented and super-smart ones like Obama, to be able to come up with all the ideas about how America can and must reinvent itself for the 21st century. Our project is just one small effort to help figure that out. I’ll be explaining more in the coming month.

Grove was really excited by all that’s happening around the new Google+ platform and encouraged by how much Google is prioritizing its development. What I particularly liked about his analysis was that he kept talking about this being “the early days,” with so much more that can happen ahead of us.

This is significant coming from Grove, who was the head of YouTube’s news and politics work in the last presidential cycle, from around 2005 to 2008, when I was also enmeshed in that same space of figuring out how to use the YouTube platform for important things, like influencing politics. (I was the director of the New Politics Institute during that period, and in fact, gave a talk at the Youtube campus where Grove introduced me. You can see the video of all that on my site here.)

Grove saw the embryonic Youtube and could see what it could become. And he now sees the embryonic G+ platform, with its interactive video hangouts, and he sees very similar promise – as do I.

I was still mulling last week’s meeting with Grove when I came across this article that takes on the old conventional wisdom that downplays the significance of Google+ in general and the interactive group video hangouts in particular. That old conventional wisdom is so wrong, and this article points out one of the reasons why:

The G+ Hangouts are a platform that provides something that we haven’t been able to experience up until now: Up to 10 people connected via video from their disparate locations in the real world. This is big because most of what human beings do is through face-to-face communication. We are only relative newbies in expressing ourselves effectively through keyboards or through our thumbs on mobile smartphones.

And because hangouts are an open platform, then innovative people can go nuts building remarkable projects off it. That article talked up what’s to come, Grove hinted at what’s to come, and my new project is gearing up to come too. More soon.

The piece weaves together footage from many of the recent extreme weather events and then layers in comments from scientists and others in the know that connects all these developments directly to climate change. The piece gets particularly haunting when they also layer in comments from the Exxon/Mobile CEO about how we will adapt and then other commentators who hit the refrain: “Welcome to the rest of our lives.” The eerie music pulls it all together.

It did hit me hard, but it also hardened my resolve to take this on more directly in my next phase of work. I have an idea about how to initiate a conversation about more fundamentally reinventing America using the new medium of interactive group video. I’ll explain more later, but for now, this video should give anybody pause that we all need to step up and get focused on much bigger changes to deal with the much bigger challenges to come.