FCW Insider: What would an Obama administration look like?

One of the parlor games going on right now is asking the question, "What will a new administration look like?"

Everybody keeps hearing the mantra of change, but...what does change mean for this world?

The Atlantic Magazine this week has a worth-reading piece headlined, HisSpace -- it's a take off of MySpace, get it?  The article offers some thoughts on what a President Barack Obama might put forward.

Some interesting points from the article:

It’s worth noting that some of the best-known presidents in U.S. history have stood at the vanguard of past communications revolutions—and that a few have used those revolutions not only to mobilize voters and reach the White House but also to consolidate power and change the direction of politics once they got there.

The communications revolution under way today involves the Internet, of course, and if Barack Obama eventually wins the presidency, it will be in no small part because he has understood the medium more fully than his opponents do...

Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting “online fireside chats” as president. And when one imagines how Obama’s political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.

In this community's parlor game, everybody seems to agree that an Obama administration would be very different from a McCain or even Clinton (2) administration.

I hope that some government issues are addressed at some point in the campaign -- they've been largely absent so far. And there are only 168 days left until election day.

UPDATE: I saw this story in the Washington Times today:

Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is trying to tap a new audience of potential voters by taking his campaign message straight to liberal and nonpolitical issues-based blogs, which reach millions of readers but don't often delve into conservative politics.

The strategy was in full swing yesterday when Mr. McCain invited non-conservative bloggers to join his regular blogger conference call, just hours after he delivered a major speech previewing his war strategy and other priorities for a first presidential term.