Marc Andreessen: An hour and a half with Barack Obama

Boy, they should drop millions of copies of this from an airplane over the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

We're going to have to buckle in, for days-on-end, of the Clinton Campaign spinning and smearing how Hillary, despite being behind in the delegate and vote count, is winning all the "big" states, the "bellweather" states, the states Democrats are going to need to win in the General Election.

True enough.

However, the converse must also be true - that Hillary can't win the small states, the caucuses, and those will also need to be won in November.

To that, you can also question how, in some of these "small" states, the Hillary Campaign blew them off, or put little effort into them. Is that the strategy we want to invest in for the General Election?

And before you let all the bubbles and confetti from Texas and Ohio blur your vision, since Super Tuesday, the head-to-head record in primaries and caucuses is 13-3, in favor of Obama.

All of this, and more, will be hashed and rehashed in the days and weeks ahead (Go to Memeoradum for the multitude of articles and latest updates)

We digress, wanting to call attention to a recent post from Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley "whiz kid" entrepreneur best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.

"An hour and a half with Barack Obama"

Andreessen writes of meeting with Obama, in early 2007, before the big show got on the road;

"The reason I think you may find this interesting is that our meeting in early 2007 was probably one of the last times Senator Obama was able to spend an hour and a half sitting down and talking with just about anyone -- so I think we got a solid look at what he's like up close, right before he entered the "bubble" within which all major presidential candidates, and presidents, must exist.:

And the first impression that Andreessen notes is that Obama is a "normal guy";

"We were able to have an actual, honest-to-God conversation, back and forth, on a number of topics. In particular, the Senator was personally interested in the rise of social networking, Facebook, Youtube, and user-generated content, and casually but persistently grilled us on what we thought the next generation of social media would be and how social networking might affect politics -- with no staff present, no prepared materials, no notes. He already knew a fair amount about the topic but was very curious to actually learn more. We also talked about a pretty wide range of other issues, including Silicon Valley and various political topics.

With most politicians, their curiosity ends once they find out how much money you can raise for them. Not so with Senator Obama -- this is a normal guy."

There's a lot more to this post, including;

"What's the picture that emerges from these four impressions?

Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer.

If you were asking me to write a capsule description of what I would look for in the next President of the United States, that would be it."

Take some time and read "An hour and a half with Barack Obama"

(H/T To Fred Wilson)


Bonus Links

Brilliant at Breakfast: Somewhere in New York, Rudy Giuliani is wailing, "Why didn't fear work for ME?"

Josh Marshall: Final Thoughts

Glenn Greenwald: The "Rezko" game

Mark Halperin: Clinton Wins Big, But Math is Troubling