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Obama: From Bottom-Up Candidate to Top-Down President

Obama: From Bottom-Up Candidate to Top-Down President

Like so many of us, California’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom was inspired by Barack Obama’s Internet-driven 2008 Presidential campaign. Indeed, Newsom was so inspired by a campaign run by “35,000 self-organizing communities” that he wrote a book called “Citizenville,” which sees all change as beginning from the bottom up. But Newsom has fallen out of love with Barack Obama. As he told me at our latest Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast event at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, the “bottom-up candidate” has turned into the “top-down President.” Obama isn’t the Internet President, Newsom insists. By transitioning from change.gov to whitehouse.gov, he’s let his Internet base down.

By Andrew Keen

February 12, 2014

But Newsom has fallen out of love with Barack Obama. As he told me at our latest Ericsson and AT&T hosted FutureCast event at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, the “bottom-up candidate” has turned into the “top-down President.”

Obama isn’t the Internet President, Newsom insists. By transitioning from change.gov to whitehouse.gov, he’s let his Internet base down.

The American challenge, Newsom told me, is to get back to our roots. America, he insists, is “unusually civic.” And this can only be brought out by going back to change.gov.

Is Newsom right? Can the Internet get us back to de Tocqueville’s America?

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By Andrew Keen

Author, "The Internet Is Not the Answer", Digital Vertigo

Andrew Keen is one of the world’s best known and most controversial commentators on the digital revolution.

He is the author of three books: “Cult of the Amateur,” “Digital Vertigo,” and his current international hit “The Internet Is Not The Answer,” which the London Sunday Times acclaimed as a “powerful, frightening read,” and the Washington Post called “an enormously useful primer for those of us concerned that online life isn’t as shiny as our digital avatars would like us to believe.”

He is executive director of the Silicon Valley innovation salon FutureCast, the host of the popular Internet chat show “Keen On,” a Senior Fellow at CALinnovates, a columnist for CNN, and a much acclaimed public speaker around the world. In 2015, he was named by GQ magazine in their list of the 100 Most Connected Men.