There’s a new generation of people who don’t want to ever be “cool” like Barack Obama. They just want to be themselves.

I think there’s a great deal of truth in that. But I’ve also seen that American culture sucks people in very quickly. Working in the software biz, of course I see plenty of Indians and Chinese. The engineer types are often like Bobby Jindal, in that they have little concern for being cool. But the Indian kid who came to America and went to Stanford or Columbia and then got his MBA at Yale… he’s just as much a status-obsessed urban striver as the kid that grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He wants his Beemer, he watches all the right shows, he mocks Bush and he votes Democrat right down the line.