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When people like Colin Powell say Mr. Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.

<!-- end #inTP -->I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: The divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization, but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.

Republican strategists have exploited this shift to their party’s advantage, beginning with the ever-prescient Kevin Phillips’s identification of the “silent majority” of white working-class voters in 1968.

The rise of the creative economy generated a shift in social values. Tolerance, diversity, and self-expression became prized. Diversity and self-expression became necessary for the creative economy to flourish and function.

As it grew and became more concentrated in locations such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C. - what we now know as blue America - the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization shipped jobs overseas, while institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions - were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of former Bush political strategist Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans and to use it to his political organizational advantage.

· Expanding the availability of visas for skilled researchers; and

· Encouraging in-migration of foreign start-ups through “soft landing”
programs.

Most experts agree this is the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The stock market is down almost 25 percent so far this year. Housing prices in the United States are off more than 20 per cent since their peak in 2006. Manufacturing output is falling and consumer confidence has slipped.

<!-- /Summary -->Martin Feldstein, former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, past chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard economics professor - usually a voice of calming reassurance - wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Sliding into recession, monetary policy already at maximum easing, and fiscal transfers impotent … an unenviable situation, to say the least, for any incoming president.”

While Fordism looks stable on the surface, it suffers from a fatal flaw: It’s impossible for consumption to keep up with the ever-growing pace and efficiency of production. This is particularly true of recent times, when a great deal of production has been sent to China, India and other places where labour is cheaper. It’s hard for the working and middle classes to consume more when their wages are essentially stagnant. Low-wage workers in emerging economies do not have the income to fill the gap. And while the ranks of the rich have grown, the wealthy are a relatively small group that can buy only so many luxury cars, designer products, homes and yachts.

That’s where credit comes in. Those new fancy mortgage instruments were meant to turn homes into veritable “piggy banks” that could be used to finance bigger and better cars and homes and toys.

As one leading blogger, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, recently put it: “Since consumption has come to depend on growth in indebtedness, a reversal, however painful, is necessary. Our excesses have been so great that there is no way out of this that does not lead to a general fall in living standards.”

There you have it. The financial crisis is in reality a much deeper crisis of our underlying economic model and our way of life. It’s a crisis of the way we have come to define ourselves.

some are just attracted to a night life that involves actually talking to creative people doing exciting things, rather than heading out to clubs and bars that beat you into silence with their thundering rhythms.

“Instead of just going out to drink and be bored,” said Ilana Arazie, whose video blog, Downtown Diary, chronicles her love life, “you’re talking to interesting people who are starting companies and telling great stories.”