On Thursday, the Washington Post published a very thoughtful op-ed, Global Action to Save Global Growth, by Secretary of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon. For those trying to define the narrative, the agenda, the language and better understand the challenges of the era after Bush, this well-crafted piece offers a glimpse into what will be a very different era of global politics and economics:

HOKKAIDO, Japan -- Global growth is the leitmotif of our era. The great economic expansion, now in its fifth decade, has raised living standards worldwide and lifted billions out of poverty.

Yet today, many wonder how long it can last. The reason: Plenty comes at an increasingly high price. We see it daily in the rising cost of fuel, food and commodities. Consumers in developed countries fear the return of "stagflation" -- inflation coupled with slowing growth or outright recession -- while the world's poorest no longer can afford to eat.

Meanwhile, climate change and environmental degradation threaten the future of our planet. Growing populations and rising wealth place unprecedented stress on the earth's resources. Malthus is back in vogue. Everything seems suddenly in short supply: energy, clean air and fresh water, all that nourishes us and supports our modern ways of life.

As the leaders of the Group of Eight gather here, we know that these issues affect us all: north and south, large nations and small, rich and poor. And we know we must find ways to extend the benefits of the global boom to those who have been left behind, the so-called "bottom billion." In dealing with problems of such dimension and complexity, there is only one possible approach: to see them for what they are -- as parts of a whole requiring a comprehensive solution.

A big part of that solution should be a "global supply-side response," as some economists put it, grounded in sustainable development -- nations, international financial organizations, the United Nations and its various agencies working together as one.

Begin with the global food crisis. It has many causes, among them a failure to give agricultural development the importance it deserves. What's needed, in effect, is a "green revolution" of the sort that once transformed Southeast Asia, this time with a focus on small farmers in Africa. With the right mix of programs, there is no reason productivity cannot be doubled within a relatively short span, easing scarcity worldwide. We've seen it happen in Malawi, which with international assistance has shifted within a few years from being a country plagued by famine to one that exports food.

In Hokkaido, I will call on G-8 nations to triple official assistance for agricultural research and development over the next three to five years. We must act immediately to get seeds, fertilizers and other agricultural "inputs" to farmers in vulnerable countries in time for the coming harvests. We must encourage nations to eliminate the export restrictions that many placed on foodstuffs this spring, as well as the more long-standing subsidies that many developed nations provide their farmers. Such artificial barriers distort trade patterns and drive up prices, deepening the immediate crisis and jeopardizing global growth.

With climate change, as well, sustainable development figures large in the solution. Most experts agree that we are nearing the end of cheap energy. Alternative technologies are among our best hopes for cleaner, affordable power. Here, too, a new "green revolution" is underway. The United Nations Environment Program has found that $148 billion in new funding went into sustainable energy last year, up 60 percent from 2006 and accounting for 23 percent of new power-generating capacity.

Our job, as national and international leaders, is to help guide and accelerate this nascent economic transformation. We need to change social behavior and consumption patterns throughout the developed world. And we must help developing countries "green" their economies by spreading climate-friendly technologies as broadly as possible.

We can take a big step forward in Hokkaido. Mindful of our responsibilities to the poorest nations most vulnerable to climate change, we must fully fund the global Adaptation Fund and make it operational. Looking forward to the December climate change summit in Poznan -- and to Copenhagen in 2009 -- we must push ahead with negotiations for a comprehensive agreement limiting greenhouse gases. Above all, we need to inject a sense of urgency and real leadership into this quest. It is not enough to set goals for 2050, far down the road. We need a middle-term timeline to 2020 if we are serious about promoting change now.

Lastly, Hokkaido will test our commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. For Africa alone, donors have pledged $62 billion a year by 2010. Those in need have faces: mothers who die needlessly in childbirth, infants stunted through life because they do not receive adequate nutrition during their first two years. We promised to help. Now is the time to do so.

Never in recent memory has the global economy been under such stress. More than ever, this is the moment to prove that we can cooperate globally to deliver results: in meeting the needs of the hungry and the poor, in promoting sustainable energy technologies for all, in saving the world from climate change -- and in keeping the global economy growing.

These are the ties that bind us. We must act, in Hokkaido and beyond -- not merely because it is the right thing to do but also because it is in the enlightened self-interest of all of us.

In the coming month, NDN will be attempting to address some of the themes raised in this piece. This week we will host a major new speech by U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman on the future of the climate change debate in the United States; our new Green Project will release a new paper on the Solar Tax Credit and the need to invest in renewable energy sources; NDN Globalization Initiative Chairman Rob Shapiro will host a lunch looking at a new paper he's released that makes a compelling argument for how and why we can enact a carbon tax; we will host a discussion with Hon. Carolina Barco, Colombian Ambassador to the United States, who will discuss the state of our hemispheric relations and how we can best meet our common challenges; we will release a new paper that looks at the centrality of mobile devices in helping struggling nations grow; we will release a video interview with U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, author of the Global Poverty Act, a far-sighted piece of legislation that will position America to lead the world in meeting the Millennium Development Goals cited above; we will conduct an event on how high energy prices will affect America, a nation built on the assumption of low-cost energy; and of course, we will be banging away each day here on our blog and with the media.

To us at NDN, these are hard times, struggling times for our nation. But also a time of possibility, a time in which we can imagine once again doing big and important things, and leading America and the world with grace, confidence and success into the very different global political terrain of the 21st century.

When John McCain returns from his trip to Colombia and Mexico, he needs to clarify where he stands on the very important issue of how to best fix our broken immigration system. Once a great leader on immigration reform, his recent statements make clear that to win the Republican nomination and appeal to the anti-immigrant sentiment in his own party, he abandoned legislation that he himself authored and has now betrayed the immigrant community he once championed.

For someone like myself, who has worked hard, in a non-partisan way, to fix the broken immigration system these last few years, I find it incredible that John McCain would not just abandon his strong advocacy of comprehensive immigration reform, but attempt to mislead people about his record. This past weekend, we saw him - at a very important gathering of Hispanic leaders - misrepresent his position on the last great immigration reform bill in 1986.

In this 2008 interview with Tim Russert, McCain said his own legislation was dead. In this presidential primary debate in Los Angeles, McCain said he would not vote for his own bill.

Once for comprehensive immigration reform, now against it. Once against the 1986 immigration bill, now for it. John McCain, when you come home this week from your travels, it is critical that you clarify just exactly where you stand on the important issue of immigration reform.

First Newsweek showed Obama up 51-36. Now LATimes/Bloomberg has it 48-33. The two daily tracks Rasmussen and Gallup still have it 4-6 points. So where are we?

I believe deeply that the race for President wants to be a 10 point Obama victory. The underlining structure of the 2008 campaign has Democrats with 10 plus point advantages in all the major measures - party ID, congressional and presidential generic ballot test. In 2006, the national vote for Congress broke about 53-46, and Tom Davis, the savvy GOP Congressman, says the environment is much worse this year. Democrats are showing incredible intensity, and have created a new model of politics that will allow them to involve millions of partisans to help the campaign as never before. As I wrote recently, Democratic leaning groups - women, African-Americans, Hispanics and Millennials - turned out in very high numbers in the Democratic primaries, offering what might be a very different electorate in 2008. McCain is by any historic measure, a weak and bumbling candidate, ill-suited for a presidential race, and is still struggling to bring his party together - a party which has never liked him very much anyway.

The polling has been remarkably consistent in one regard. In almost every poll, Obama is in the high 40s, which would lead one to believe this is actually where he is now. What is changing is McCain's number, which is moving around in a range from the low 40s to mid-30s. 42, 42, 38, 36 and now 33.

The conclusion - Obama is definitively ahead of John McCain at this point. Obama has unified his party and overcome problems he had with groups in the primary. He is already ahead in polls in enough states, including CO, FL, MI, NM and PA to see his path to electoral college victory. All rather remarkable for this bi-racial candidate with a funny name who few had heard of even a year ago. McCain, on the other hand, is clearly struggling to get even into the low 40s on a consistent basis. He is having a hard time bringing his party together, and his electoral college map looks problematic now. Even if Obama wins by 4-5 points, it is by presidential standards a landslide. Bush never won by that amount in either of his races. These new double digit polls also show that it is possible for this race to end up where it wants to be - which is Obama winning by 10 or more. Even the ambition of the Obama buy this week is as much about McCain's weakness as it about Obama's strength.

I always assumed that this race would be close until October and then would break open for Obama with him winning by 5-10 points. But the fact that we are seeing this degree of McCain weakness this early is suprising to me, and it is this weakness that is the story of the presidential race so far.

I'm quoted in two pieces today on the momentum events of the last few days. One, by the ever-sharp Susan Milligan in today's Boston Globe, talks about why Senator Clinton lost:

More damaging, critics say, is that the veteran staff was operating from an old playbook, misreading the mood of the country and the new makeup of a 21st-century Democratic electorate.

With her promises to wage war on the enemy - be it Republicans, pharmaceutical companies, or oil interests - Clinton made a textbook appeal to the Democratic Party of old: working-class white Americans, union members, and senior citizens. Obama, however, picked up on the physical and emotional exhaustion many Americans felt after the bitterly partisan Bush and Clinton years, and built a new Democratic coalition among young, educated, and independent voters.

Obama had been to 30 states to campaign for fellow Democrats in 2006, and developed a keen sense of the country's mood, analysts said. Clinton, who was obliged to concentrate on her own reelection in New York, traveled to only 14 states to campaign for fellow Democrats in 2006, and did not pick up on the direction the country was headed politically, they said.

"They didn't understand how much politics has changed since the 1990s. They were slow to use the Internet and the new media. Their understanding of the new coalition was imperfect," said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democratic Network and a veteran of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.

The other, in Wired, talks about why Obama won:

Ever since the internet propelled Howard Dean's campaign to national importance in 2004, observers have expected the web would soon play a pivotal role in electing a president. As Obama makes history by becoming the first African-American presumptive presidential nominee, his campaign is also the first to fulfill that long-anticipated internet promise. With an enormous internet-driven donor base of 1.5 million people, more than 500,000 of whom have accounts on Obama's social networking website, Obama is the first internet candidate to win mainstream success. His online supporters have created more than 30,000 events to promote his candidacy, some of which are still underway in the last primary states of Montana and South Dakota.

"It's impossible to imagine Barack Obama's rise without the modern methods that his campaign used to organize itself, particularly around the internet," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the non-profit think tank the New Democratic Network. "This really was the most successful campaign of the 21st century."

"This is what happens is when you have a charismatic candidate, and you organize on a scale not seen before," he adds. "Literally, the size and scale of this is unprecedented in American political history, and it wouldn't have been possible without the money, and passion, and support of millions of American people."

The campaign came up with a number of innovations on the internet. It used wikis -- online collaborative software -- to coordinate and churn out precinct captains in both California and Texas. And it created a counter-viral e-mail campaign to combat the anonymous e-mail smears that question his religious faith and patriotism. It set up policy pages that solicited ideas from supporters, and at one point, the campaign solicited letters from supporters over the internet to lobby the undecided superdelegates.

And Obama's campaign constantly updated its YouTube channel to keep its supporters around the country up to speed on his latest speeches.

Obama's campaign spent significant resources on physical offices in battleground states. But those efforts often came to follow the informal infrastructure that his supporters built ahead of time by finding each other through my.barackobama.com and coordinating off-line to campaign for their candidate.

The most obvious area in which it led was online fund-raising. Just under half its record-level of $265 million raised so far came from donations of $200 or less, much of which flowed to the campaign through the internet. The Clinton campaign ended up tweaking its fund-raising approach after Obama's initial successes and began asking supporters for smaller amounts of money in online fund-raising drives following each primary victory.

In contrast to Obama's campaign, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has raised only $90.5 million during the same 2007 and 2008 period. Just over a third of his donations came from the $200-and-under crowd. Forty-two percent of it came through contributions at the maximum $2,000 level. For Obama, just under a quarter of his donations came from $2,000-level donations.

Obama's record fund raising enabled him to out-blast his chief rival through traditional television ads in battleground states during the Democratic primaries, as well as build out the physical infrastructure needed to organize volunteers.

But it was also savvy off-line campaigning that boosted the size of his online cadre of supporters, notes Rosenberg.

"One of the reasons that they have so many donors is that they were able to collect millions and millions of names through their rallies," he says, referring to Obama's stadium-sized political events, one of which took place tonight at the Xcel Energy Center, where the Republican National Convention is scheduled to take place this summer. "It was all part of an ecosystem where they made it clear that they wanted supporters to be at the center of the campaign."

Each of these interesting articles visit themes we've been talking about here for years - the emergence of a new politics of the 21st century. I end this post with a long repost of an essay I wrote in early February right before Super Tuesday which offers a way of thinking about what this new people based model of politics Dean pioneered and Obama took to another level means. To me what we are seeing is the emergence of a virtuous cycle of participation, which I guess could be described as a political version of the network effect. But the key here is that what Obama, David Plouffe, Steve Hildebrand and others have done is to create a new and better model for how we organize our politics and advocacy, one that brings together on and off-line, and that is,simply, a much better model than the old 20th century tv-based broadcast model we all used for so long:

A Virtuous Cycle of Participation - Finally, Obama has one very powerful advantage in these final days that is hard to see and evaluate - the power of his virtual community across the country. We saw the power of this community with the truly extraordinary amount of money it raised for him in January. But equally important in these final days will be the virtual door knocking these millions of people will be doing - emails to their address books, actions on MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites, text messages sent to friends, viral videos linked too, and comments left on blogs, newspapers and call in radio shows. It is no exaggeration to say that this million or so impassioned Obama supporters will reach tens of millions of voters in highly personal ways in the next few days, providing a messaging and personal validation of Obama that may be equal in weight to the final round of TV ads, free media and traditional grassroots methods.

All the way back in 2003, I wrote an essay about this new era of participation in politics that argued the new Dean campaign model was changing the way we had to imagine what a Presidential campaign was all about. In the 20th century, a Presidential campaign was about 30 second spots, tarmac hits and 200 kids in a headquarters. In the 21st century, the race for the Presidency would be about ten million people going to work each day, wired into the campaign through the campaign's site, through email, sms, social networking sites etc acting as full partners in the fight not just passive couch potatoes to be persuaded.

This is a very different model of politics. One begun by Dean but being taken to a whole other level by Obama. It puts people and their passion for a better nation at the core of politics. When used correctly, it creates a virtuous cycle of participation, where more and more people engage, take an action and bring others in, creating a self-perpetuating and dynamic network of support. It is also why the endorsements of entities with large, active virtual communities - Kerry.org, MoveOn - is so meaningful for Obama. He has created an on-line ecosystem that can quickly take advantage of the support of the millions of people now doing politics in this new 21st century way and exponentially grow his dynamic community of change.

The Democratic Party is one entire Presidential cycle ahead of the Republicans in adopting this new model, and I will argue it is simply not possible for the Republican nominee to catch up this year. Too much experimentation, too much trial and error goes into inventing this new model for it to be easily and quickly adapted. It has to be invented, not adapted. I'm sure the GOP will catch up over time, but this year year the only GOP candidate who has taken this new model seriously has been Ron Paul - and they have paid the price. Obama raised almost as much money in January of this year as John McCain raised in all of 2007. Democrats are raising much more money across the board, seeing historic levels of voter turnout, increased Party registrations and millions more working along side with the campaigns - all of which is creating an extraordinary virtuous cycle of participation that continues to grow the number getting engaged in politics as never before. While there can be little doubt that anger towards Bush and disapointment with his government is a driving force behind this, the key takeaway is that the adoption of this new politics by Democrats allowed the Party to take advantage of this tidal wave in unprecedented ways, and will be one of the Democratic Party's most significant advantages going into the fall elections.

Much attention has been given to the money raised by this Obama network. Much more needs to be given to the power of it to deliver message, provide personal validation to friends, neighbors, colleagues and peers in ways so powerful, and ways never seen before in American history. I have no doubt that it has been the campaign's ability to foster and channel the passion of his supporters - creating a vrituous cycle of particpation - into an unprecedented national network - helping amplify and reinforce the power of Obama's argument - that is playing a critical role in Obama's closing the gap with Clinton in these final exciting and dramatic days before Super Tuesday.

The challenge for McCain of course is that he has yet to even begins experimenting with this people based model, and is, at this point, not in a position to catch up. As one begins to handicap the fall election this yawning gap in models between the two campaigns will emerge as one of the greatest differences between the a new and dynamic 21st century politics and what I think will be seen as a last gasp of an old - and failed - 20th century politics.

Florida's Hispanic community is changing. Waves of new Puerto Rican, Mexican, Central and South American immigrants have made the historically powerful Cuban-American community a minority of the statewide Hispanic vote. And the Cuban-American community itself is changing, with many more post-1980 immigrants and 2nd generation American-born Cuban-Americans entering the electorate.

These changes have made the Florida Hispanic electorate much more Democratic, and much less open to the failed hard-line Cuban policies advocated by President George W. Bush and McCain. In 2006, a majority of those Hispanics who voted in Florida voted Democratic. New registration numbers from Florida show that there are now more registered Hispanic Democrats than registered Hispanic Republicans.

In a comprehensive poll of the Cuban-American community conducted by NDN in 2006, an overwhelming majority of Cuban-Americans favored negotiation with a Cuban government led by Raul Castro, and a majority of those who arrived in the United States after 1980 favored the relaxation of travel and remittance restrictions imposed by Bush and supported by McCain. The poll did not find deep support in the Cuban-American community for McCain's current Cuba policy, and there is a great deal of openness to the policy advocated by NDN and Obama that begins with the relaxation of travel and remittances to the island but does not include elimination of the embargo.

Its changing population is changing Florida's politics. The reliance of McCain on a failed, hard-line policy toward Cuba will not carry the weight with a very different Florida Hispanic electorate it once did. It is an old play out of an outdated, 20th century Republican political playbook, and while it may excite a small and shrinking part of Florida's Cuban electorate, it will not be a terribly effective tool for McCain to reach the increasingly Democratic and non-Cuban Hispanic population of Florida.

For more on Cuba and the views of Cuban Americans, visit our Web site to watch video of a forum we convened to discuss what a post-Castro Cuba would look like for the United States and the rest of the world.