Douglas Rushkoff has a pretty terrific piece up on his blog about Obama. It talks a lot about some of the things I’ve been thinking about since he won the nomination.

Presidential politics is tricky, because America is a big-game culture. It’s not like that everywhere. We’re a country that is willing- excited, even- to crown the New York Giants the Super Bowl champions of a year in which their opponent broke all performance records, based solely on the strength of a single masterful performance. It doesn’t work like that in the Premiereship, where there’s not even a playoffs system, the teams just play for a few months and whoever did the best in that period is the winner. But part of the fabric of America is the idea that if you show up at the right place at the right time, with greatness behind you, you deserve to be the winner.

That reflects in how we think about Presidential elections, too. It is easy, and tempting, to be inspired by Obama and to focus your energy on getting Obama elected. To see the quest for having a good guy as the President (certainly, at least, relative to the last guy to have the job) as the goal, and to think that, if the big game goes our way, we’re the winners.

Rushkoff’s piece is an optimistic counterpoint to that line of thought. It’s really important to remember that the real work is done on the ground, that the reason Barack Obama is the best we can hope for in a President right now is because we live in a country is because we haven’t got a movement that’s capable of transcending him. Not yet. Electing Obama is important and useful, but it’s a foci for change, not change itself. His candidacy, and what it inspires in people, is effective as a symbol for the ground-organized America that we want to live in, but it’s not the thing itself. As in all things, it’s vital to remember that the map is not the territory.

But it is a map, and that’s something Rushkoff puts succinctly in his piece. Check it-

Those of us hoping to build communities, improve our schools, invigorate our local economies, restructure our land use, or reduce our energy dependence mustn’t equate a presidential campaign with substantive change. Obama may be a convenient conceptual placeholder for these concerns, as well as a person capable of dismantling a good amount of America’s more fascistic and militaristic infrastructure. But the only way he’ll even have the latitude to behave in a slightly more enlightened manner than his predecessors will be if we, the actual people on the ground, have chosen to live more consistently with those goals. If he’s president of a nation of fast-food-eating, bigoted, and selfish SUV drivers, he’ll prove as powerless as Cheney was malicious. And the results will be the same.

Part of the reason I found it so easy to be disillusioned with politics for so long was that I wanted it to be easy. I wanted to believe that if you focus your time and energy on winning the big game, then the rest trickles down. That isn’t how power moves. Politics is a tool, and it’s a vital one. Opting out of it is a privilege of the disaffected American- you’ll notice that movements in places where the situation is more desperate never say it doesn’t matter who’s president- but pretending that it’s the point is just going to lead to frustration. It’s true if the best candidate who can win is someone you don’t like very much; it may be even more true if the candidate you want to vote for is someone you believe in.