1. Combine charm, youth, rhetoric, a multiracial persona with dramatic sets like the retracing of the Lincoln route to DC and the Latin seal to create a sort of messianic personality that ensures popularity ratings over 50%.

2. In deference to the Left, showcase black feminist poets, gay priests, radical environmentalists, open borders advocates—all in symbolic ways or in appointments to lower, less important offices that won’t turn up too embarrassing on the Drudge Report.

3. Tack to the center on the hunch that the media was anti-Bush rather than anti-his positions per se. So putting an Obama stamp on existing Bush foreign policy does wonders, and helps unite the country. As we have seen with Sen. Patrick Leahy’s softball questioning of Eric Holder (in comparison to his fiery dissection of Attorney General Gonzalez), or the media silence about the suddenly OK Patriot Act (there will be no more stories about a shredded American Constitution), power is all that matters, and all that ever did.