Time for a little hometown chest-beating: “Blame Us,” a massive oral history of the Bay Area’s role in Obama’s rise, out in the new issue of San Francisco:
Without Bay Area technology, ingenuity, righteous indignation, and cash, Barack Obama would not be president today. A flash oral history of a nation-changing collision between A) a long-shot candidate who belived that only people connected could fix a broken democracy and B) a ramped-up region of idealists and web wizards fighting to do just that.
The story hit the web yesterday, and I’m proud to have played a part in its creation, interviewing the likes of Pete Leyden, the progressive politico and futurist big-thinker, and Sean Quinn, the professional poker player cum blogger and one of the minds behind FiveThirtyEight.com, the uncannily accurate online polling sensation. As reporters, though, we had it easy, simply doing our interviews and uploading the tapes. It was the editors who had the tough job, molding those hours (and hours and hours) of interviews into coherence. Bravo, guys. It’s a perfect postscript to the swearing-in of our new president.