It was one afternoon when I was on my way to an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library called “Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper” that I caught my first glimpse of the revolution in advertising. I saw it on the side of a Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority bus: a long, clean, pastel-blue rendering of the words “Yes You Can” with the o of the word you filled in by a version of the long-familiar, red-and-blue, yin-and-yang logo for Pepsi-Cola, now redesigned to look as much as possible like the hopeful-sunrise-on-a-ploughed-field Obama logo. There was no mention of Pepsi that I could see, but then I wasn’t looking closely at the words. I seem to remember something about deliciousness—was it?—or maybe youth and excitement in what amounted to a screen crawl at the bottom of the ad, but I didn’t bother trying to read what it said. I was already lost in a lovely reverie of empowerment.
I wasn’t (of course), but my wonderment could hardly have been greater had I been. As it happened, I had also just been reading an article in The Washington Post about the subtle shift in the relationship between power and celebrity since the era of our last celebrity president, Bill Clinton. “I have noticed one key difference in our culture,” the Post quoted Michael Levine, “a Hollywood publicist for twenty-five years”:
Clinton basked in the glow of celebrities. Now celebrities bask in the glow of
