As a former journalist, schooled in the great traditions of journalism of the 20th century, I have to add my voice to the chorus and say that I was deeply disappointed in the performance of the profession in the debate last night. Deeply disappointed, if not angry, and yes, maybe a bit bitter.

At a moment when America needs our journalists and commentators on politics to help the country move beyond the petty, bickering, red-herring politics of the past 25 years, the moderators of the debate went back for one long immersion. George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson spent the entire debate at this momentous time in American history trying to parse out the clauses of off-hand remarks, point out the support of people with seven degrees of separation from Obama, and trap the candidates in these gotcha moments that would put a ripple in another 24 hours news cycle. It was deeply disappointing.

I must say, in my opinion, Clinton did not do much to resist the flow back to those past norms. She cut her teeth in that kind of political environment, learned to play well at that game, won a lot, and lost some. She seemed perfectly at home going back to the gotcha, parsing, split-hair politics that defined the Bush Clinton Bush years.

Obama truly did try to do something different, tried to break into a new kind of politics, a new kind of framework, a new kind of discussion. He needed to show he could battle head-to-head, and not appear wimpish, but he genuinely tried to shift the conversation to a higher plain. He did ok in that – certainly better than anyone else on that stage.

It’s so disappointing because our country is at a moment in history in which we face a series of deep structural changes to the American economy and society, to the whole world order, and we are up against a series of 21st century challenges that are unprecedented and extremely complex. If anything we need to call upon the best in the American people, the best in American political leaders, and the best in American journalists, to rise to the occasion, face up to the challenges, and help figure this out for the country and the world.

At a moment when we need that, the last thing we need is to get completely mired in this old politics, in which we’re worried about who wears a lapel pin, or whose supporter was a radical Weatherman 40 years ago. At a moment when our country needs to fundamentally rethink how we run the economy, how we distribute wealth, reinvest in our infrastructure, shift to new energy sources, rebuild our schools, provide healthcare in a 21st century setting of biotech and genetics, Stephanopoulos is trying his best to get the candidates to say: read-my-lips-no-new-taxes. He’s trying to fiscally hamstring the country for the next four years, or catch the Dems in a way that will allow McCain, a throwback not just to Bush but to Reagan, to hammer them about raising taxes this fall. (Folks, how many more times can we retread tax cuts as the center of our economic policy? The deficit is in the trillions, our infrastructure is collapsing, etc, etc. Why are we still back in that old Reagan frame?)

It’s difficult to watch and not get angry, and maybe even bitter.

One thing that makes me hopeful that is a basic confidence in the American people, the bedrock of our democracy. It looks like people are not buying this. In the bigger context of the race, Obama, who is bucking this old framework and forging a new one, maintains a lead and momentum. In the smaller context of the upcoming primaries, these distractions do not seem to be pushing the poll numbers around much.

You have to hope that there is a core wisdom in this complex mix of classes and ethnic groups and races that makes up this amazingly diverse democracy. You have to hope that a collective wisdom will come out of this process that moves away from the old politics, built on that old media and old journalism, and moves towards a new politics, which is increasingly built on new media.

It’s worth remembering the YouTube debates. They were not perfect by any means, but they were far better than the debate driven by the best of ABC News. At least CNN and YouTube blended together and tried to pose questions from average people with real concerns, balanced by journalistic analysis. The candidates were able to mostly talk about real issues and not this gotcha stuff.

It’s good that politics now has a more open new media environment to turn to when the one-way broadcast media proves wanting. Now people can see Obama expound upon a gotcha race moment at great length via a 45 minute video of his speech. They can just go to the web and instantaneously see it. The environment of new media is allowing for a new politics, a new conversation, a higher plane of discussion that is woefully missing from the politics of the last 25 years.

Some people lament the collapse of broadcast TV ratings, the freefall of newspaper circulation and ad revenue, and there is a place in my heart that laments the undermining of the great journalistic tradition of Edward Murrow and the Watergate reporters. But when I see performances like those of Stephanopoulos and Gibson, it makes me think: bring it on.

Coming on the heels of a slew of stories about how people have been using mobile phones to organize against the government in places like Tibet and Egypt, the NY Times magazine published a truly great article yesterday by Sara Corbett on the growing global power of mobile phones, Can the Cellphone Help Global Poverty? An excerpt:

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world's population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world's mobile subscriptions were in developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require customers to have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or personal computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the cellphone is more egalitarian, at least to a point. 

"You don't even need to own a cellphone to benefit from one," says Paul Polak, author of "Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail" and former president of International Development Enterprises, a nonprofit company specializing in training and technology for small-plot farmers in developing countries. Part of I.D.E.'s work included setting up farm cooperatives in Nepal, where farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale. "People making a dollar a day can't afford a cellphone, but if they start making more profit in their farming, you can bet they'll buy a phone as a next step," Polak says.

Last year, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, published a report with the International Finance Corporation entitled "The Next Four Billion," an economic study that looked at, among other things, how poor people living in developing countries spent their money. One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category - information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study's principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that's almost never the case. What they're buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family's income grows - from $1 per day to $4, for example - their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. "It's really quite striking," Hammond says. "What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications."

There are clear reasons for this, but understanding them requires forgetting for a moment about your own love-hate relationship with your cellphone, or iPhone, or BlackBerry. Something that's mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal - land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars - can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. A "just in time" moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone's ability to increase people's productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There's the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people's loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move - displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies - can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

This understanding of how being connected to this immensely powerful emerging global communications network was behind the two papers NDN released last year, A Laptop in Every Backpack and Tapping the Resources of America's Community Colleges. In these papers NDN argues for a new national committment to give all our workers and kids access to the global communications network and training on how to best use it for their own life sucess. As Alec Ross and I wrote in our Laptop paper:

It is the core premise of this paper that the emergence of a single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together, is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications, media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. 

Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do. Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world.

We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success. There is no way any longer to imagine free societies without the freedom of commerce, expression, and community, which this global network can bring. Bringing this network to all, keeping it free and open and helping people master its use must be one of the highest priorities of those in power in the coming years.

This paper offers thoughts on one piece of this commitment - how we best bring the power of this network to America's schoolchildren. Achieving the American Dream in this century increasingly requires fluency in the ways of this network and its tools - how to acquire information and do research, how to construct reports and present ideas using these new tools, how to type and even edit video. We believe we need a profound and urgent national commitment to give this powerful new 21st knowledge, essential for success in this century, to all American school children.

The implications of the spread of this mobile, global communications network are huge and only just beginning to be understood. It is a subject we've spent a lot of time thinking about, and plan to spend much more time in the coming years. We've looked hard at the coming power of mobile for advocacy at our affiliate, the New Politics Institute, and also recommend a compelling new series in the current issue of the Economist. And we are proud that Senator Obama has choosen to adopt our Community College plan outlined in our paper in his campaign for the Presidency. But there is much more to understand about how all this is changing the world, and how we can best harness it for the common good.

A lot going on in the reimaging video front these days, the frontier where the new world of web video and the old world of traditional TV are butting up against each other, and even melding. A few stories and developments are worth pointing out:

The New York Times has a front page story today bringing the uninitiated up-to-speed on two trends we have been long talking about at the New Politics Institute: the viral nature of online media and the new media habits of the young Millennial Generation. Not a lot new there, but a nice overview with some nice numbers (Young people have tripled their voting numbers from 2004 to 2008 in the 22 states will exit polls so far.)

But there are some other nice stories elsewhere that go deeper. Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej have a very nice column in politico.com that analyzes the shift from soundbite to what they call "sound blast." and they lay out the numbers for web video that are starting to add up to serious impact. An example:

So far, Obama’s videos have been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube.com — and that's not counting partial views, since YouTube only reports a full viewing as a “view.” His campaign has uploaded more than 800 video clips, and adds several more a day.

If you just look at his ten most viewed videos, here are some astonishing facts:

• The average number of views for these top ten is currently more than 1.1 million (nearly double the average from a month ago!)
• The average length of these ten videos is 13.3 minutes.
• There have been nearly 3.9 million views of the longest of Obama's most popular videos, his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America.

By contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s YouTube numbers are nowhere as impressive as Obama's — a sign of her failure to understand and embrace the new medium than anything else. She’s garnered about 10.5 million views, but the average length of her top ten most viewed clips is only two minutes. Several of her top ten videos are actually 30-second TV ads, in fact.

There is a legitimate argument that traditional television still reaches far more people than video online. That is true, but a development that is just happening today may start to bridge that gap.

A new website called votervoter.com is just launching that will make it very easy for average individuals to create 30-second spots and get them placed on broadcast and cable television, starting with a $1,000 buy. The site is run by an advertising company with deep experience in placing TV ads, called Wide Orbit, in San Francisco.

This could be a very interesting development because you could image people banding together outside the campaigns to raise money to place popular online videos on mainstream TV. Given the looser campaign spending limits for backing ads like this, you could see a lot of money getting channeled this way. We’ll soon see.

And soon enough we will be taking a deeper look at some of these developments at our upcoming Reimaging Video event, It’s in DC on April 24th. Hope to see you there.

Senator Obama will give a major address today on race. Somehow this feels like one of those defining moments in a campaign, where a candidate must rise to a powerful challenge to his or her candidacy. Successful candidates seize this moments. Failed candidates don't.