My first Inauguration as a reporter was Nixon’s in 1972. I was CBS’s “man” in the parade after the swearing in. I was in the backseat of the third car after the presidential limousine, coasting slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. United Press International’s Helen Thomas was up front on a car phone, dictating color commentary to a desk person who was typing it right onto the wire. Helen told me that her husband had been the AP reporter who followed Kennedy’s car in Dallas, dictating “color” the day he was shot.

Helen was describing the red, white and blue bunting on the buildings, the crowds lining the avenue — and the heckling — and the objects thrown at Nixon’s car. He had beaten George McGovern in a landslide, and yet a dark, ugly loathing marred the first day of Nixon’s second term.

There’ll be none of that today. I was in Washington yesterday, where optimism, a happy sense of a clean beginning saturates the city. It’s that way everywhere. And that’s a little worrisome. No one can meet expectations this high.

Even David Brooks, The New York Times so-called conservative columnist, was effusing about Obama changing our values, our lifestyles, in his column today.

It is true that presidents have a mysterious way of affecting frame of mind. With Nixon, the country was roiling with generational, political, racial, social divisions. Factions were pitted against one another. Nixon left, Gerry Ford was sworn in and BOOM! Overnight, the venom drained from the body, and a calmness like the new president’s temperament settled on all of us.

When Jimmy Carter was in office, there was universal nervousness, only partially resulting from the gas lines and the hostages in Iran. An air of constant angst emanated from the White House where the lights were on all night, and as Ted Kennedy said, “They lurched from crisis to crisis.”

Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, and again overnight … we all hit the serene button. The new president came into work late, and went home early. He gave off the sense that “this too shall pass,” and we all just simply relaxed.

So presidents clearly affect our mood.

But I am reminded of a history seminar I took in college that asked: What’s more important in history: One Man or technology? It came to mind reading David Brooks, as he smartly described the “loss of community and social cohesion” over the last several decades, and applauded Mr. Obama’s attempts to restore an end-of-ideology unity in the land.

I used to think that the “loss of community” was something brought to the country by the Republicans and specifically Ronald Reagan. Labor unions were crushed (starting with the air-traffic controllers), and generally the individual was celebrated. It was Reagan’s philosophy, as in: We Americans are individualistic as opposed to the Commies. With Reagan’s preaching, we glided away from togetherness, and it gave weight to the idea that One Man makes that much of a difference.

But in looking back, I now think the loss of public cohesion was driven far more by what happened to television. Hear me out!  From the 1950s through the ’80s, television brought the country together. There were only three networks, so all of us began watching the same shows. We laughed at the same jokes, soon wore the same clothes and ingested the same news. We chose among only three nightly news broadcasts, with basically similar stories every night. That’s what produced the cohesion; television led to a Golden Age of oneness.

Then came cable and what we in TVLand call narrowcasting. A splintering geographically, politically, generationally, economically, educationally — on and on. And it was accelerated by the Internet. 

This is a tsunamic technological wave that continues to narrowcast us into parochial niches. The question I have is whether One Man, even one as unifying and charismatic as Barack Obama, can defeat such a powerful force. It’s nice to think so.