Different theories of change

David Brooks has an excellent column today about the core difference between Clinton and Obama in their approach to politics:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!”

...For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Clinton had sounded like a traditional executive, as someone who gathers the experts, forges a policy, fights the opposition, bears the burdens of power, negotiates the deal and, in crisis, makes the decision at 3 o’clock in the morning.

But Obama sounded like a cross between a social activist and a flannel-shirted software C.E.O. — as a nonhierarchical, collaborative leader who can inspire autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns.

It's a fad these days to make this sort of conceptual distinction within some domain--bottom-up versus top-down, stochastic versus deterministic, decentralized versus hierarchical, etc.--and then go ahead and call it "X 2.0" or otherwise hail it as the Next Big Way Of Things. So I approach Brooks' facile distinction between Clinton and Obama along those lines with some wariness.

Still, though, it seems to me like Brooks is making some keen observations here. Clinton's message is: "I will make it happen". Obama's is: "You will make it happen".