• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 2, 2008

Anyone familiar with this column probably knows that I think of most things in terms of media, and that I also believe virtually everything is media. Including U.S. presidents. That's right. U.S. presidents play a lot of roles. They are the chief executives of our federal government. They are the commander-in-chiefs of our armed forces. And they are - or should be - our nation's chief cheerleaders. They do this by conveying messages. And that, of course, is where the media thing comes in. Don't worry; I'm not going to revisit the messages of past presidents - especially a soon-to-depart one. Instead, I'd like focus on the one our President-elect has conveyed and likely will continue to convey.

First and foremost, Barack Hussein Obama has communicated a message of change that I don't think most of us fully realized until he actually took the stage in Grant Park to give his acceptance speech on Election Night. The pundits and the campaign teams could say all they wanted about how Campaign '08 was not about race, but that night, and for the days and weeks following, it clearly was at least partly so. And in a really good and profound way.

Let's put aside the substance of Obama's message for a minute, and focus purely on the symbolism. Yes, he clearly is African American, but he's also symbolic of what makes Americans great. With the exception of Native Americans, we are all fundamentally immigrants who came to this country because of opportunity - in the case of most of our ancestors, their own. In the case of native-born African Americans, somebody else's. But it is the rich, dynamic, ethnic diversity of this country that I believe makes it truly great. But what do you expect from a mutt. I'm part Italian (or to be really frank, Sicilian), and part German- and Russian-Jew. So in a small way, I can relate to the power of Obama's story: what it's like to be of mixed roots, and why that's actually a good thing, not a bad one.

Imagine growing up in New York during the 1960s, one half Jewish and the other half Roman Catholic? (I like to joke that I grew up hating myself for crucifying Christ.) From my Catholic friends I got a good dose of anti-Semitism. From my Jewish friends, I learned what it was to be a culturally rich, though often suspect, minority. But in many ways, I think I had the best possible grounding that anyone could have had growing up in that time. It taught me tolerance and compassion for people who weren't just like me. And it also taught me that there are some advantages to being culturally diverse. In those days - at least in the New York public school system - we were actually taught that way. The power of America, we were taught, was that it was a great "melting pot" that absorbed and assimilated the cultures of everyone who came to its shores.

It wasn't until I began traveling outside of New York City that I realized this was more of an ideal, than a fact in many parts of this country, and explains why our first 43 presidents were Christian, white males. That all changes next month when Barack Obama becomes our 44th, and brings with him a message of cultural diversity and inclusion for America, and quite possibly, the rest of the world.

Obama was born with that story, but his success is due in part to the way it has been nurtured and the people who helped nurture it, especially chief campaign strategist David Axelrod; whom we've selected as No. 1 on this month's MEDIA 100 list for the role he played getting Obama elected, and the role he will play helping to shape his message - as well as America's - over the next few years as a senior member of the Obama Administration.

Meanwhile, I've got a bit of advice for the new First Family. Instead of getting some new fancy breed, or popular hybrid-breed, why not go down to the pound and pick yourselves up a mutt.