To see a whole new kind of 21st century political ad check out the new Obama ad on the main page of the Dallas Morning News running this morning. Don't know how long it will be up there so go now - and it will be hard to miss.
For more on how to use a new whole new generation of tools to improve your capacity to advocate visit the New Politics Institute and our "New Tools" campaign there.
A Sunday NYTimes piece by Adam Nagourney takes a look at the final strategies and tactics of the two campaigns in the all-important home stretch in Ohio and Texas.
Be sure to note the success the Obama campaign has had it with its google ads, something we talk a great deal about at our affiliate, the New Politics Institute.
Update - Remember California. As I look at Obama's small lead in the final round of Texas polls, I am reminded of California and the excellent campaign the Clinton campaign has run this year in the Hispanic community (from ads to issues to surrogates). Most of the final CA polls had Obama ahead or very close in California. But driven by a huge performance of Hispanics, a group difficult to poll, Senator Clinton won the state by ten points.
Could this pattern repeat in Texas? Could Hispanics deliver her another essential win? And what happens if she wins the popular vote and he the delegates? Going to be a fascinating night on Tuesday.
Update 1 - Two new polls out Sunday have OH and TX too close to call, with Clinton up 4 in OH and Obama up 1 in TX. Tuesday is going to be quite a night.
Update 2: A national AP piece on this consequential battle closes with this passage:
"The Clinton campaign clearly has much more money than they had before, but they are still being dramatically outspent by Obama," said Simon Rosenberg, head of [NDN], a think tank. "And things don't seem to be trending their way and they don't have a lot of tools to deal with it anymore."
Any talk about transformative change in the world today must at some point look at the rise of China. The rise of China, along with the rise of India and Asia in general, is fundamentally restructuring the geopolitics of the early 21st century. So in our Moment of Transformation gathering on March 12, we will be looking hard at the emergence of China and its impact on US foreign policy. And we are extremely fortunate to have Orville Schell to help guide us.
Orville Schell deeply understands China and has been studying it since the 1960s as a student, academic, journalist and author. He is the author of no less than 9 books on China, including Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders. His books are a nice blend of deep thinking that can be found in academic writing (he has a Ph.D. in Chinese History from UC Berkeley) with a contemporary understanding of a working journalist (for example, he covered the war in Indochina in the 1960s).
It is no wonder that when the New York-based Asia Society was looking for a director to head its new Center on U.S.-China Relations, they wooed Orville. To get a sense of Schell see his masterful interview of Henry Kissinger at the inauguration of the Center in New York about a year ago.
When he joined the Asia Society, Schell had just completed a decade as Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he helped move the program into the new multimedia digital age. Schell was known for opening the school to a variety of non-traditional teachers, often working journalists and writers who would give open lectures and teach classes for a time. He did much to move the school towards preparing students to be fluent in the ways of video and the web.
Schell now gets to China quite a bit and has done much thinking about how America should deal with this emerging giant. Come to the Transformation event to see him and a great lineup of people with similar stature in different fields. Just be sure to RSVP.
We’ve been talking a lot on the blog and our websites about our upcoming event called “A Moment of Transformation.” This is not a typical Washington DC event, but more like a new breed of conference that is appearing in the private sector. These conferences focus on presenting big ideas from many disciplines in a memorable way. They seek to bring together a remarkable collection of speakers and leave much room for discussion and networking.
The conference that set the standard in this realm is the TED conference, which originally stood for Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, but now is just known as TED. This week TED is being held in Monterrey California, on the Pacific coast, with a simulcast linked to Aspen, Colorado. You can get a good background of that conference here, or just watch video of past events off the TED site.
TED pretty much does not deal with politics or government. However, our Transformative Moment event does. (TED also costs $6,000 and our event is free.) We have pulled together a terrific group of speakers who will talk bout the transformations happening in their fields with an eye towards how they might impact politics and government. In the run-up to the conference in a couple weeks, we will highlight some of them, starting with Amory Lovins.
Amory Lovins has blazed a trail over the last couple decades in understanding how to build a sustainable economy with clean energy in very practical ways. He was one of the coauthors of the seminal book Natural Capitalism, which talked about how to use market mechanisms to reward energy efficient, sustainable behavior. He then coauthored the extremely practical Factor Four, which focused on very specific ways to improve energy efficiency by a factor of four. His latest book is Winning the Oil Endgame, which carries on in this tradition, looking at how to overcome our oil transportation hurtles.
Amory is cofounder and now Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a non-profit looking at a broad range of issues having to do with sustainability. RMI was way ahead of the curve on talking about sustainability, starting in 1982. They now have a staff of about 40 people based in Colorado.
Amory has been given many awards, including a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, known as a genius grant. I got to know him through his involvement in Global Business Network, a pioneering think tank on the future. He was one of their 120 remarkable people who helped many private sector companies to understand the big trends shaping the future. Amory is sure to do the same for us at the March 12th event. I hope you come and see.
In the meantime check out a two-minute video below of Amory at TED where he discusses how we can reduce oil dependency.
Peter Leyden
Director of the New Politics Institute
Some Rights Reserved 2008 - Present, NDN. 
Orville Schell
Amory Lovins
