Obama spent most of the marathon campaign that just ended telling people that he wanted to move beyond the old partisan politics. Having won the election, he now faces a set of problems of a magnitude we haven’t faced since the 1930s. Just as Obama was Mr. Consistency on the campaign trail, sticking to the same themes and policies across the states and months, so, I think, he wants to demonstrate consistency from the campaign through the transition into government. “Remember what I said on the trail?” he’s in effect saying. “I meant it. And I’m going to act on it.”

A president with that sort of carry-through would be something extraordinary — and unfamiliar. I understand why Obama partisans might discount the promise of transcending partisanship as being so much blather. Our last president made campaign noises about “being a uniter, not a divider” and proceeded to pursue an intensely divisive agenda with the thinnest of mandates.

After such an experience, we can be forgiven for collectively discounting all talk of moving beyond the old battles. But I think Obama meant it, and means it, and means to see what happens when a president actually tries to deliver on that promise. While removing Joe Lieberman from his post might satisfy many an activist’s sense of justice, it won’t move us any closer to fixing the economy, reforming healthcare, or reversing the Bush Administration’s destruction of our functioning government. Whereas holding on to Lieberman’s vote in the Senate might.

In other words, settling scores is, and ought to be, a lower priority than delivering on a big policy agenda. If Obama can achieve that — and anyone who defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and won the White House as a black candidate knows something about achieving tough goals — then the scores will have a way of settling themselves.

“One voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

• My Father's Vote - Andrew Leonard: My friend Andrew writes a moving piece about his father, the great critic John Leonard, who died last week.

• Twitter / denise caruso: @scottros crap! 1500 words …: Denise Caruso wonders: what’s a reasonable target for how many words to write in a productive day? I’d Twittered at the end of the day yesterday that, having written 1500, I was ready to quit. She’d been aiming for 3000. I think it all depends on your style (I tend to polish as I go along rather than speed-drafting rough cuts for later refinement). Also on the overall size of the project. I’ve been writing roughly 1000 words per day for months now (with breaks for family, interviewing and other research). There’s a different pace to a marathon than a sprint…

• Taking note: Outlines and Meshes: Interesting thoughts on the nature of outliners springing off a post I wrote a couple years ago that still seems to get regular traffic. Maybe there’s something to this outlining thing…

For the past eight years, beginning with the Florida recount and ending with Sarah Palin’s last-ditch culture war, we’ve heard about the intense partisanship of the divide between red and blue. And one common idea about that divide has been the notion that the Web has helped create it, with its “echo chamber” effect. We have become a nation of “confirmation bias” addicts; we only read what we already agree with; we construct our own reality according to our close-minded beliefs. And that is why America is so angry, so split, so impossible to govern.

If that were true, then how did the most Web-enabled presidential campaign in history lead to such an overwhelming, incontestible outcome?

We’ve now had an election that was — whether you choose to call it a “landslide” or not (I do) — not close at all. We had “rednecks for Obama” and “Obamacon” neoconservatives for Obama and Republican loyalists looking up in the voting booth and saying to themselves, “Oh my god, I’m voting for Obama.” We had the most potentially divisive candidacy in our lifetime — an African American liberal from an urban Northern state running on a peace platform! — produce a victory that was won with an almost shocking degree of calm and respect.

Obama himself and his campaign deserves most of the credit for this, of course. But perhaps we can also reserve a little mental space for a reevaluation of our assumptions about the role the Web plays in our political discourse.

It hasn’t been my practice to post writing from my new book here (it’s just a fuzzy draft right now!), but this is a short passage from a discussion about the “echo chamber” argument that I think is pertinent:

Yes, American politics had grown bitterly polarized in the 2000s. But were the angry arguments on the Web the cause of those divisions? More likely, they simply mirrored profound disagreements among the American people about the impeachment of President Clinton, the contested outcome of the 2000 election, the Bush administration’s tactics in its war on terror, and the invasion of Iraq. What kind of media environment that accurately represented the political pysche of the American population would not bristle with rancor under the pressure of such events?

Today, we have at least an opportunity to begin to reduce that rancor and rebuild a national consensus. We have the first president in ages who can legitimately claim a mandate and work with a Congress of his own party. And I think we will see that the Web has a part to play in fashioning such a consensus. It doesn’t have to be a force for division; using it as such is a choice, not a technologically determined inevitability.

For all the Democrats who have spent the last several months not daring to get too overconfident, fearful of some last-minute dirty trick, worrying despite all the evidence that some Karl Rovian demon would spring out of the darkness of the national psyche to trip up our candidate: It’s time to let all that go.

Over the last few weeks, I collected a few links for this moment, which I was confident all along we would arrive at — mementos of naysaying that deserve one last snort before we despatch them to the Web scrapheap.

Here, for instance, is a strange post from the Asia Times by “Spengler”: “McCain will win in November, and by a landslide.”

There was also that refrain of concern that Obama was “not a closer” — first outlined by doubters during the primary season, more recently propounded by Karl Rove to spook the Democrats.

Even more insidious was a high-flown piece by Lee Siegel (of sockpuppetry fame) in the Wall Street Journal, which sang the praises of “the Republicans’ unilateral mastery of the cultural strategy” in the wake of the Palin nomination, under a headline touting the “edge” that “Sarah Palin and the Republicans” had this fall. Siegel also threw in a gratuitous sneer at Obama’s name (”like having a Democratic candidate for president named Pruschev at the height of the Cold War”).

In the Boston Phoenix, my haunt in the ’80s, Steven Stark spun out the masochistic scenario of a last-minute Truman-like turnaround for McCain.

We can put all that behind us now. There, I feel better.

Pressing the reset button internationally — We need a president who can start over with the rest of the world. It’s obvious.

The “Muslim factor” — the lies about Obama’s religion are a pathetic effort to sway the ignorant. But Obama does have a different understanding of the world thanks to having spent some time as a kid in Indonesia. It will help the U.S. to have a president who actually knows something about Islam.

Electability — “Rather than limiting a Democratic campaign to a desperate hunt for one point over the 50-50 line that has marked Bush-era politics, Obama’s new throngs could tip the election in a stalemate-breaking way,” I wrote in February. Tomorrow we’ll know whether that proves out, as all indications suggest it will.

Positive vibration — “It’s hard to remember any political campaign as relentlessly upbeat as Obama’s, or as unwilling to sling mud.” Though the race certainly got tougher on all sides, I think that judgment still holds. To the extent that Obama has campaigned negatively, he has taken aim largely against the failed policies and record of the GOP, not against the person of John McCain. Like many Democrats, I worried back then whether Obama was “ready to rumble” when the Rovian attacks kicked in. But we were wrong. Obama and his team understood that the sharp counterattacks that please his partisans turn off voters in the undecided middle. He kept his eyes steadily on that prize. It has paid off beautifully in the last six weeks, when he could say, accurately, that he’s talked nonstop about the economy while McCain has talked nonstop about…him.

To these arguments, we can now add one more crucial one that has emerged: the even keel.

People are scared, and have been since the market meltdown in mid-September. They want to elect a president who looks like he’s able to figure out an effective strategy to revive the economy and then apply a steady hand in executing it. Anyone who’s been paying attention to Obama can see such qualities in the way he has run his campaign. McCain’s strategy of the week approach, by contrast, feels erratic and opportunistic. (And that’s not even bringing up Sarah Palin.)

The campaign started with McCain as the choice of voters seeking steadiness and reassurance and Obama looking like something of a gamble on the unknown. But we ended the campaign with the two exactly reversed. Of course other factors have been vital: the Obama campaign’s passionate organizing on the ground, the intelligence and heart of the candidate’s speeches, the astonishingly effective online fundraising from small donors, and the determination to contest the election beyond the old red/blue state lines.

But in the end, I believe Obama will win tomorrow because he is the candidate who has earned voters’ trust: trust that he can begin to solve the nation’s myriad problems; trust that he can begin to unwind the Bush legacy; trust that he can handle whatever comes up.

He is the unlikeliest candidate ever, and he had to go a lot further to earn that trust than his opponent. He has amazed us all by going even further than we dreamed.

Yesterday the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced it was abandoning daily print publication. In Portfolio, Marc Andreessen proposes that other newspapers follow suit and finally give up on print:

If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?

Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offense. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ‘85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business — shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defense and into playing offense, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.

The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 percent of your revenue. Then you play offense. And guess what? You’re an internet company.

The Intel reference here is an oblique reference to Andy Grove’s famous comment to the ASNE that the newspaper industry had three years to adapt or die.

That was in 1999.

Andreessen’s advice makes total sense in many ways — it would be fascinating and worthwhile for at least one major newspaper publisher to try it. This sort of turn-your-company-on-a-dime idea is part of the Silicon Valley ethos. But I just don’t see it happening.

Hard though it no doubt was, it’s still a lot easier for a hardware company like Intel to retool its fabs and its engineers to produce a different kind of chip than for a newspaper company to retool its reporters and editors to produce a different kind of media product.

Shutting off the presses at the New York Times, or any other major newspaper publisher, would make the company an “internet-only company.” But it wouldn’t make it an Internet Company, in the larger sense. You’d still have a newsroom full of people used to doing things a certain way, proud, with good reason, of that way, and suspicious of change. It’s much easier to build a new company from scratch than to transform an existing one into something new.

But the bigger problem isn’t psychological, it’s financial. I base my views on a decade of experience at Salon, trying to support an online-only newsroom with online-only revenues. It turns out that the hardest part of this massive and inevitable industrial transition is not reconstituting high-quality journalism in a new media environment. That’s only mildly hard. Top-notch journalists will always seek to do top-notch work.

The really tough part — the part that to this day remains unsolved — is figuring out how to support those top-notch journalists with the salaries and benefits they are accustomed to, and often deserve. (That’s not even taking into account the loss of jobs on the printing and distribution side. But they are disappearing eventually no matter what.) The problem today is not much easier than it was when we started Salon in 1995: Look at Politico — an online success d’estime that still earns 90 percent of its revenue from a niche print product.

Newspaper companies are clinging to their dwindling print profits because they can’t yet see a way to keep anything close to their current pay scale and benefits in an online-only world. And the hardest pill for the industry to swallow is that there may not be any way to do that.

Internet companies pay top dollar to their engineers, not their “content producers.” There is no shortage of reasonably high quality content on the Web, much of it produced for free or little pay. Of course blogs and “user generated content” can’t replace the collective output of the nation’s journalism professionals today. But they offer plenty of alternatives, and enough occasions on which they surpass the pros (or expose the pros’ failings) to keep readers occupied, and sometimes satisfied.

As Bruce Reed wrote in Slate last year during the Hollywood writer’s strike, “There is no such thing as a writer’s market. With or without subsidy, words are always in surplus, and it’s always a reader’s market.”

No amount of handwringing will change that. If newspapers are really going to take the leap Andreessen proposes, they will have to do it while simultaneously restructuring their deals with their employees and mandating painful cuts that nobody wants to accept. Which is why I don’t think they will do it at all.

Ironically, of course, those jobs will vanish anyway. As I wrote in June, I think the newspaper-company ships are doomed to sink, and individual journalists will have to find their own individual lifeboats and routes to shore. The sooner they start, the better.

ELSEWHERE: Mark Potts thinks “Newspapers haven’t even scratched the surface on potential online advertising revenue” and an exclusively online operation could rake in more money. I don’t know; I’ve been there, done that, and it’s not so easy. Alan Mutter says the magic multiple is 3 – newspapers would have to triple their current online revenue to break even.

Twitter was built for people to share “status messages” — the answer to the “What are you doing?” question — but most of the people I follow don’t use it for that very much. They use it to comment on news events and to share links they like. Because of this disjunction between original design and “street use,” I find that Twitter gets only one thing about sharing links right — and pretty much everything else wrong.

What it gets right is immediacy. Twitter is fantastic when there’s a breaking story and you want to see what links people are handing around. It’s a much speedier way to tune in to what’s happening (Senator Stevens — guilty!) than RSS feeds or reloading a news site’s front page.

But Twitter privileges “now”-ness over everything else. You can’t tag your links. You can annotate them only if you can say what you wish in under 140 characters (actually, under 140 minus the length of the URL). You can’t even see what the actual URL is, most of the time, since people use URL-shorteners to save space. There is really no other way to say this: For a service that is so widely used to share links, Twitter really sucks at it.

Delicious has long offered the best combination of features for simple link saving and sharing (it’s got space for annotations and a spiffy new interface). You can use Delicious to “follow” (subscribe to) specific tags, but not, as far as I can tell, to follow specific users. (If I’m behind on Delicious’s feature set, enlighten me!) You can use Delicious-generated RSS feeds for that, but we’re getting pretty far afield — nothing remotely approaching Twitter’s simplicity.

So here’s an opportunity for Twitter, or for someone else, if the Twitter team is too busy: Offer a service very similar to Twitter but optimized for link-sharing. (FriendFeed is cool but it’s trying to do so many other things at the same time that I don’t think it suits what I’m talking about.) Make it easier to share links real-time; expose the actual URL; give us some rudimentary tools for organizing the links; and watch something cool grow.

Of course, Twitter has the critical mass of usage right now, and that’s not going away. But surely there’s room for improvement.

Over the past month we have seen the collapse of an entire economic philosophy that has driven our nation for decades. In parallel to this ideological failure, we are experiencing the political failure of the Republican right that has dominated American politics since 1980. These are cataclysmic changes, like nothing we’ve seen in at least 30 years.

Thursday Alan Greenspan sat before Congress and said he had “found a flaw” in his worldview. Indeed! Or as they say in the ’sphere thes days, EPIC FAIL. It was as if he took a look at the whole foundational edifice of the global economic system he engineered and, morphing into Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, let out a whimpering “Never mind.” Meanwhile, the GOP isn’t waiting for Election Day to begin the customary circular-firing-squad behavior of the losing party, a ritual that most of us under a certain age have only seen executed on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Yet there are holdouts in the punditocracy who don’t seem to have taken full measure of just how much things have changed in the past month. I hate to pick on Peggy Noonan again — hey, some people think she deserves a Pulitzer! But in her column today, headlined “43 percent isn’t nothing,” she engages in precisely the kind of reality-denial that her fans insist she is immune to.

The “43 percent” are the people who are still voting Republican this year. (Time was, not long ago, that the GOP was touted as having built a “permanent majority,” so 43 percent might seem like a real comedown. Then again, President Bush didn’t actually win a majority in 2000, either, did he?) Noonan, ignoring her own candid conclusion six weeks ago that “It’s over,” wants to look at ways McCain might still pull out a victory.

How might McCain still win an upset? Noonan asks, “What if…the financial crisis seems to fade?” (Noonan implies that this is part of an argument in a Boston Phoenix column, but if you read the source, there’s nothing in it about financial crises fading.)

It boggles the mind that any journalist could get such words past a sentient editor. Imagine someone, four weeks after 9/11, asking, “What if the terrorism crisis seems to fade?” Memo to Ms. Noonan: even if the Dow skyrockets next week, the financial crisis isn’t fading any time before November 4. We will be lucky if it has faded before November, 2012. It is a world-historical event. It will be reshaping our economic lives for many years to come, even in the best of scenarios.

Later in her piece, Noonan contemplates the unthinkable — what if Obama does win? — and offers the standard-issue columnist boilerplate advice: he’d better govern from the center! Or else! Then she lets loose this doozy:

if he goes left — if it comes to seem as if the attractive, dark-haired man has torn open his shirt to reveal a huge S, not for Superman but for Socialist, if he jumps toward reforms such as a speech-limiting new Fairness Doctrine, that won’t yield success.

I do believe that we need, not perhaps a new Fairness Doctrine, but a special new Rhetorical Honesty Act — or, I guess, a constitutional amendment, to get the rule past the First Amendment — banning any Republican from trying to spook a Democrat with the “Socialist” label ever again. Because we already have a “socialist” president. His name is George W. Bush, and he is, as I write this, nationalizing the banks and presiding over the greatest expansion of government meddling in private industry that the U.S. has ever seen.

“Stick to the center” is a natural fall-back for the losing party in a presidential election. Winners are free to embrace it or reject it as they choose. I recall that the conservative punditry never offered this advice to George W. Bush in 2000. Once he took office after the most hotly disputed election resolution in American history, he took an unearned “mandate” to radically reshape much of American government and foreign policy.

But if, as seems quite possible, Obama wins a sweep and the Democrats wind up with a strong majority in both houses of Congress, you will hear a loud chorus from the right and center-right press: President Obama, they’ll say, don’t “go left” — you have no mandate. In fact, in that scenario he will indeed have a mandate, and I imagine he will use it. But I also think he will govern toward the center — not because of what Noonan or anyone else says, but because it seems to be his nature.

UPDATE: More “S”: This hysterical piece from Mark Levin at NRO’s The Corner paints Obama as a “hardened ideologue” and “charismatic demagogue” who will wreck America with “the soft authoritarianism of socialism.”

From Paul Boutin in Wired comes the simple form of the argument: Blogging’s no longer hot. The cool kids are all playing with Twitter and Facebook. The blogosphere has been “flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

Boutin seals his case by reference to Jason Calacanis’s much-ballyhooed retreat from his blog to a mailing list. Boutin somehow buys Calacanis’s public rationale — “He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters” — which sounds great until you think, uh, couldn’t he have just turned off the comments?

Then there’s Robert Scoble, who now reserves his blog for longer essays and can be found in many other spots on the Web distributing links and videos and tweets. Scoble’s choice seems perfectly sensible to me; he is a restless early adopter and experimenter, but he’s not exactly abandoning his popular blog.

Boutin’s piece betrays a nostalgia for what it explicitly refers to as a “golden age” of blogging, which apparently occurred circa 2004 and was led by people like Calacanis and Scoble. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my book research it’s that each of us locates blogging’s “golden age” in whichever era it was that we discovered the phenomenon. For me, it was probably 1998, when I found my job as Salon’s technology editor incomparably enriched (and also assisted) by the first flowering of the tech and web-design weblog movement. For many others, it was the early days of Blogger in 2000-2001, or the explosion of political blogs and “warblogs” post-9/11.

There were, in other words, at least three — and probably several more — waves of bloggers preceding Boutin’s version of a “golden age,” each of which felt they were discovering something new. (See Rebecca Blood’s “law of Weblog history.”) And, inevitably, after our personal “golden age” experiences, whenever they were, we tend to get disillusioned. Some will gravitate entirely away from blogging; others achieve some peace with it despite its limitations and problems. I guess Boutin is somewhere in that cycle now.

I share his distaste for the way that the commercialization of the Technorati Top 100 has turned a certain type of blogging into a rat race, but I don’t see that as having ruined blogging for the rest of us. Nor do I see a phenomenon with tens if not hundreds of millions of participants as dead. Of course the Silicon Valley early-adopter crowd has moved on — that’s what they’re supposed to do, once something they pioneered has gone mainstream. Boutin, meanwhile, is now a full-time blogger at Valleywag. Perhaps that dismal gig is what’s got him so down.

A broader epitaph not so much for blogging itself but for the promise blogging made of widening our democratic discourse comes from Nick Carr (on his, er, blog, of course). Carr writes about the changes since he started blogging in 2005: apparently in that distant halcyon time, Technorati could be reliably used to track discussions in the blogosphere, but now, Google does a better job. Google Reader, too, has supplanted Bloglines as the RSS reader of choice for many (me, too). Back in 2005 the Web was “centrifugal,” pulling us away from centers of gravity, but today, as Google becomes the center of so many Web services, the medium has once again become “centripetal,” Carr argues. He is smart enough to admit that centrifugal forces remain — enterprising sites and bloggers that still employ “deliberately catholic linking” — but says they’re weaker than the centralizing forces.

“For most of us, most of the time, the World Wide Web has become a small and comfortable place. Indeed, statistics indicate that web traffic is becoming more concentrated at the largest sites,” Carr writes.

I recall reading identical passages a decade ago, when the first flush of Web novelty had worn off and the portals were taking over. Then, as with Carr’s observation today, we were told that the Web’s innovative days were over, its disruptive potential was used up, and the big media conglomerates were back in charge. At that moment, you could still count the number of weblogs on your fingers (and maybe toes); Google hadn’t even been founded yet.

I continue to bet on the flexibility of the Web as a platform for personal expression that will keep mutating and surprising us. Blogging has been a central part of that phenomenon for a decade. Of course it will continue to evolve. But I don’t see it diminishing in importance.

Consider the case of Merlin Mann, whose excellent 43 Folders blog rose to stardom during Boutin’s “golden age.” Mann’s experience made an effective case study for how a blog could grow from a personal obsession to a profitable small business, but over time he grew disenchanted with much of what “pro blogging” had become. As he wrote last month:

the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Mann didn’t just go off in a corner and sulk; he decided to reinvent his blog, transforming it from “personal productivity” coaching to a broader theme of helping creative people think about how to focus on what’s important to them. Kottke wrote a bit about Mann’s changes here.

I’ve come to enjoy Twitter, and made my peace with Facebook, and I don’t doubt there are plenty of people who will prefer to use these services rather than start a blog. But as long as blogging remains a form that can absorb the energy of people like Merlin Mann and serve as a creative outlet for millions of others, I will treat all reports of its demise as unreliable.

Or maybe, as Matthew Ingram Seamus McCauley suggests, Boutin was just trolling.

UPDATE: Two useful comments (from Twitter):

Paul Kedrosky: current wired piece by paul boutin about death of blogs is silly. only reason 30-author blogs exist is because of ad bubble. that’s over.

Anil Dash: Dear tech blogosphere: Paul Boutin blogs for a living in a competitive market, and just said you should stop blogging. Guess why he said it?

It should be noted that Dash’s “The Blog Cycle” is an authoritative description of the “golden age” phenomenon I described above.