(This has been re-posted from our friends at Trumpet and written by Robbie Vitrano)

Can’t sleep.

It really sunk in watching last night with my daughter. We talked a lot about the shape of things. Imagine everyone had conversations like that.

Connected thoughts, loose, literal and otherwise:

Rehage and his crew came by yesterday to discuss details of moving in and last week the New Orleans Institute said they were interested in taking space, reminding me that we had incubated several companies at Trumpet – Idea Village and Savvy Gourmet both physically occupied space at the start before moving to their permanent location – and two pretty good late 90’s tech players were hatched at Trumpet from biz plan forward – iSeatz (the resident high-tech darling and sole nola representative on the Inc. 500) and TurboTrip (which sold to hotels.com for a reported cool $40MM). We named and even helped write the business plan for the them. Today, Dukky is lurching to life and Old New Orleans Rum is gestating toward a formal debut.  Within just the last week we hosted the New Orleans 100 and have seen early stage companies featuring the manufacturing of a new composite sports-flying aircraft, an amateur photography marketplace, a company that merchandises prep athletes to colleges, a great early mover in renewable energy systems, and of course the debut of the world’s ONLY probiotic bread and bagel from the boys at Naked Pizza.  All quite exciting and organic to our entrepreneurial bones.

The American Dream.

Obama talked about recapturing the American Dream last night. That fits into this thought.  It hits home and especially in the context of New Orleans reinvention.  I think the American Dream is on our plate here, perhaps more emphatically than any other place in the country because of this confluence of necessity and youth invasion in the context of a stumbling nation.  We’re the lab (or guinea pig) where the social, economic, cultural, political and environmental all mashup.  Maybe.

I think what makes America, “America” is optimism, idealism and decency.  Bush led us to isolation and suspicion.  It wasn’t the failure of his policies as much as his inability to understand what is our country’s greatest asset, resource and equity.  He is a socially/culturally autistic man.

Pundits talk about “consumer confidence” as they gauge the severity and longevity of this financial meltdown.   Yet all analysis, all calculation and decision making is based on “rational” data and metrics (see Behavioral Revolution by David Brooks – or Challenging the crowd in whispers, not shouts by Yale prof Robert Shiller).  That contradiction is proof enough for me that what the country needs, more than “experience,” is to be reacquainted with the ideals on which it was formed.  From that strategy, the tactics should follow.

Enter New Orleans.

I believe that absent a full, rich sense of the American Dream, living in America is an uninspiring uniformity of bland suburbs, chain stores, fast food restaurants and “markets” protected by armies of our children.

New Orleans is a place that can help to rescue the American Dream.

And you only whisper that with full consideration of the complexity therein, full recognition that last night, a congressman on the verge of conviction was put on the likely path of another term (but really, the Helena Hail Mary?).  But the ideal, it’s sustainability and the solution must be quite complex.  Restoring the American Dream is the better problem inspiring the better solution.

One of the heaviest criticisms launched at Obama from my conservative/Republican friends has to do with the influences in his life.  Beyond robocall-fodder Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers were people they considered more insidious like Marxist Saul Alinsky and Socialist Antonio Gramsci.  I suppose what remains unknown is whether these are people who’s theories we’re considered and weighed by an intellectually and physically engaged Barrack Obama, a man apparently at ease with complexity.   Or is he a tool of their theories?   A Manchurian candidate.

At Loyola, I studied various religions, philosophies and social theories.  Animism and Marx among them.  I suppose you could question their impact on my character and motivations.  I am a business person who takes steps to reduce the taxes I pay on my income.  I am the first college-degreed of third-generation immigrants, the son of a union card-carrying Dixiecrat.  I do believe that most corporations, left to their own devices are inclined to inflict slights small and large on the less powerful.  I believe in capitalism as a process.  I do think that many of the social problems in this country can be directly attributed to this nation’s most egregious and unreconciled social injustice and sin (slavery, jim crow, etc.).  I am optimistic.  I do think that it is wise to be suspicious of power.  I believe there is a cultural war being waged in America that is contributing to both the de-intellectualizing of and declining productivity of our country.

So the sun rises on this new day and the work begins.

Dismounting the soapbox.