Don't canonise your saints before they have performed their miracles

Its Inauguration day, and while we are delighted with the passing of the Ancien Regime, the koolaid euphoria seems to have gone to everybody's head - except, interestingly enough, Wired Magazine, which posts a sober article about the differences between the dreams that are being foist on Mr Obama's shoulders and the reality. Take the Net Utopia he is supposed to lead....as Wired notes, the hoopla was all about it being:

"Franklin Roosevelt 2.0," in the words of The Huffington Post. The Washington Post proclaimed the advent of the "YouTube presidency."
1 million:
The number of views received by Obama's first YouTube address as president-elect.

It wasn't long, however, before savvy observers noted what was missing from this and other Obama videos: the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back. The campaign initially disabled the comment function on YouTube and prevented response videos from appearing alongside. A YouTube video without comments, some pundits groused, is more like a monologue than a chat, fireside or not. "I don't see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old-style radio addresses," blogged Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government-transparency watchdog group.

....

The real reason, however, was that Obama wasn't actually trying to have a conversation with Americans via YouTube. Like every president before him, he was simply harnessing the latest tools to talk to them, one-way.

Leopards, spots, politicians, etc.....As the article notes later on though, this use of interactive media for broadcast has set unachievable expectations:

Obama has himself to blame for raising such expectations. During the campaign, he embraced every form of social media. At My.BarackObama.com, supporters could create profiles, talk to each other, and—by election day—plan some 200,000 offline dinners and living room fund-raisers. Users could log in from home to get lists of swing-state voters to telephone; this generated 3 million calls in the final four days of the race. Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.

......

But turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won't be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government. Ahead are bureaucratic obstacles the campaign never imagined, along with the political land mines that transparency brings. Obama will have to preserve the enthusiasm of his supporters while engaging the larger group of people who either didn't vote for him or didn't vote at all. His task is to rebuild the personal connection that supporters felt they had with Obama the candidate, assuring them that he is listening to them—without being deafened by the cacophony

And of course there is that little issue of democracy being for all the people, not just the weborati:

The Obama team, for all its Web enthusiasm, recognizes that an online community—no matter how vibrant—doesn't represent all of the American public. "A lot of people consider online interactions and communications as representative of Americans. But we have a lot more high-speed Internet lines to drop before that's true," the Obama aide says.

Not to mention the small problem of a looming major economic depression, some very militant foreigners, and a host of long burn domestic social issues coming home to roost that he has to manage - last time round the guy doing the Obama job had to wear the the no-win shoes as they all dropped, it was the one afterwards (FDR) that got all the prizes because by the the bad news was all out , the last of the scoundrels had been booted out (many are still in situ today and it will be a hard and damaging fight to remove them) and it was much clearer by then what had to be done.....

We wish Mr Obama the very best of luck - because he will certainly need it!

Update - Mr Obama has a blog it would seem, and intends to use it (hat tip to Adam Tinworth)