I've been a storyteller all my life, and for the better part of 20 years, made a fair living at it, having had 11 suspense thrillers and one true-crime published by major NY houses, as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles. One article I did for Writer's Digest years ago, on the the ten things you need to make your dreams come true, was so popular they reprinted it twice and then put it in a book of collected articles geared for beginning writers, as well as another one I did on the difference between suspense fiction and mysteries. (No, they're not the same thing.)
So I know a little something about "narrative" and "story arc," which is why I've been so amused at all the collective clap-trap I've been reading in recent weeks and months as the media has worked itself into a collective feeding frenzy over what they see as Obama's apparent lack of it, as if that matters one flying freaking flip when it comes to passing massive major health care reform legislation or getting a robber-baron oil company to pay all the "small people" the billions it owes them for destroying their livelihoods in its rapacious race to pile up more gold in its coffers.
What finally clarified and caught my attention was this piece in the Washington Post on Sunday by Jason Horowitz, which was not only beautifully written and wonderfully snarky toward his press colleagues, but also substantive. As Obama's close advisor, David Axelrod, pointed out to Horowitz, "so much of the coverage and commentary has to do with the narrative, stagecraft, and the political implications of what the president is doing. When you are president of the United States, the most important thing is that you cope with the disaster. Not, the story line of the disaster."
"Ax" continues:
"The problem, he added, is that the story about the story is mainly what journalists care about now. The administration's actions certainly have political implications and often political motives, but the media's default setting is to process every policy proposal, diplomatic gesture,government appointment and, now, national disaster through that prism."Events occur that don't fit neatly into a narrative," Axelrod said."But that doesn't mean you can defer them, or place emphasis on the storytelling and not the problem-solving."
This is by no means a problem peculiar to Obama. It has been going on for as long as there has been a Washington press corps and a president--probably since there have been scribes and politicians. And a few astute members of the Fourth Estate have been savvy to it:
"In a 1993 New York Times Magazine piece, the late Michael Kelly skewered the Washington press corps, to which he belonged, for its obsession with "perception." Among his peers, he noted a depressing self-awareness that the important action in government was occurring behind the scenes and outside of their grasp. As a result, he wrote, "reporters fashion reality out of perceptions."
The REAL problem nowadays, and what sets Obama's presidency apart from any that came before in this respect, is the real-time urgency of the New Media, not just the 24-hour cable-news beast that Clinton and W. both had to deal with, but the advent of instantaneous blogosphere that competes with even that, which removes any opportunity for the necessary distancing, analysis, and study that a narrative arc might require--as Horowitz put it:
"The narrative has been constantly updated -- Obama's a hero one day, a goat the next -- as ravenous news cycles and impatient audiences demand conclusions, and attention-starved media outlets can no longer subsist on the modest first drafts of history.
"We are struggling to sustain a narrative concept in an age of contemporaneity," said David Shi, the president of Furman University in South Carolina, who is writing the ninth edition of "America: A Narrative History," a popular college textbook. "The demand for analysis and meaning of things right away puts real narrative under attack."
"All of this undermines the traditional notion of a narrative as a slowly developing arc that requires perspective to be properly observed. "A narrative in the true sense means a beginning, a middle and an end,"said Robert A. Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson are touchstones of the narrative nonfiction genre. "That's a story."
So, in other words, instead of a novel, we're reading a comic book.
Only, it's not funny.
The problem with comic-book information is that the voting public, with its shorter and shorter attention span, begins to confuse the narrative storyline with the actual POLICY. As Jeremy Jacobs put it in a piece for Campaigns and Elections:
"The term’s use is an example of campaign lingo and strategy spilling over into governing. Campaigns have long focused on developing a compelling narrative then fitting issues into it. Now it appears that the story of whether a bill will pass gets more attention than what is in the bill....
"With the myriad of news outlets, it has become more effective to deliver sound bites that drive a story line rather than policy details. And to public figures, it makes more sense politically to declare victory than risk losing the news cycle by discussing some esoteric detail of a bill.“It seems like things are more and more in terms of a zero sum game,”says Payack. “You either win or you lose.”
We saw this used with particularly diabolical skill by the Bush administration. Nobody knew how to use the so-called "optics" better than Karl Rove and company. Stick their puppet W. up in front of someplace inspirational (think, "Mission Accomplished"), have him declare victory, or say he's got some kind of sweeping "vision" to, say, put a man on Mars or rebuild New Orleans after Katrina, put soaring words in his mouth, do it all on prime-time tee-vee, and you've got a winner. The commentators all have hard-ons and the American public are lulled into thinking something is being done.
Only, it isn't. Truth is, you're not doing diddly-squat. You're not increasing NASA's budget, which sends the agency into a tailspin as they try to accomplish the impossible with nothing. You walk away from New Orleans and turn it over to private contractors to plunder, and you pretty much do the same in Iraq.
When's the next speech?
You'd think the media would have figured out that they were being played but they're kinda dense, it seems.
As I said, this is serious stuff, because as they persist in covering mindless drivel like soundbites "Drill, baby drill!" over substance (see BP and Gulf of Mexico)--it is the American people who pay.
The media, it seems, dull-witted as they are, seem to think that the American people are too stupid to follow the facts of what really goes on in government. Matt Welch put it best in his article for reason.com , when he said, "Imagine what the president could do if only he had a better bumper sticker!"
"It's not hard to see the attraction of such logic. If all there was separating you from your political desires was a perfectly calibrated bumper sticker, imagine all the time you could save once you arrived at the right slogan! Surely beats zero-sum budgetary trade offs, dreary committee meetings, bill "mark-up"exercises, Congressional Budget Office scores, parliamentary maneuverings, or even substantive non-governmental policy discussions on the topics you claim to care about.
"This may be an understandable, if somewhat distasteful,intellectual path to tread for people whose jobs are based on winning elections. After all, politics has always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and hatreds do not linger long on process or policy white papers. Bumper stickers tend to be designed by people who see the target audience as bumps in need of a good sticking.
But the person who wins my prize for hitting the nail slam-BANG squarely on the head--that the whole problem with the "narrative narrative" is that it's the difference between campaigning, and GOVERNING, is Robert Shmuhl, in Politics Daily :
"What's missing in this nostalgia for narrative of 2008 vintage is there cognition that campaigning and governing are related -- but distinct-- pursuits. Seeking office is essentially an enterprise of communications: of saying what someone might do after winning an election. Actually accomplishing what's been proposed earlier involves much more than words -- or even "a compelling narrative."
"Mario Cuomo receives credit in quotation books for the chestnut "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."
"In presidential terms, prose encompasses the language that's used in dealing, for example, with the many-minded members of the Senate and the House about legislation. If specific elements of, say, health care reform aren't clearly shaped and presented, then the House and Senate will follow their own lights,necessitating the bargaining back-and-forth to arrive at an acceptable bill, if that's even possible."
This is something I have tried and tried to explain to my more ideological Democratic friends on the left, those who claim that Obama has not only lost the narrative, but his principles as well, that he has "sold out" or otherwise no longer cares about progressives. It's very easy to sit in a pundit's chair or stand on a street corner with a sign on your shoulder and shout your principles to the heavens--or even type them in a blogpost--but to get down to the brass tacks and try to get hundreds of people from hundreds of different districts all over this great country to go along with what you are trying to do is an entirely different matter.
There will have to be trade-offs because that's the way it's done.
(Hell, did you never watch an episode of The West Wing? Or any movie ever made about politics of any kind? EVER?)
So. Anyway. The problem with the media's obsession with "narrative" is that, in their insistence that Obama come up with one to their liking, they proffer their own suggestions, and when he fails to fall down at their feet in gratitude, they get their little egos hurt.
Such as, when Thomas Friedman of the New York Times suggested that the Obama administration should adopt a narrative of "nation-building at home."
When a few weeks passed and he hadn't been congratulated on his brilliance by anyone from the West Wing, he got pissed and wrote a follow-up column in which he actually put the term in italics. Just in case they'd missed it the first time, a fact which amused several of the reporters I've quoted in this piece no end.
They also quoted Frank Rich, who had written on the subject, at length, in March, in a piece called, "The Up or Down Vote on Obama's Presidency:
"And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful—both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed."
He goes on to complain that "pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress..."
Well, I would like to point out a couple of things to Mr. Rich. He wrote this column on March 7, when the whole future of health care reform was in complete doubt by every single pundit who was pontificating at the time. In fact, one of the op-eds I found to quote here was dated March 18 and said that if the president couldn't deliver on health care, it was over for him. And he signed the bill into law on the 23rd--FIVE DAYS LATER.
I would also like to mention that you can diss "pragmatism" all you want to, but as I stated in my last blogpost, Bush gave a stirring, inspirational speech from Jackson Square after Hurricane Katrina telling the suffering people of New Orleans that he would never forget them, and then he promptly walked away and did JUST THAT.
Obama may not have stood out on some pier in kleig lights with a bullhorn in his hand shouting that he would not forget the people of the Gulf, but he sat down with BP and FORCED THEM TO SET UP A FUND THAT DOES NOT FORGET THE PEOPLE OF THE GULF.
Now, WTF do you want? Bumper stickers or RESULTS?
I would also like to shine another little light on that fickle little thing called "narrative."
The storyline is in the control of the storyteller, and any reporter with a keyboard can tell whatever story they want.
Maureen Dowd, also a New York Times columnist, was kicked off the campaign plane during the '08 Obama campaign for reasons that nobody really knows for sure, and she has been on a vindictive, vengeful crusade ever since. Her columns are personal and mean-spirited and might as well be written by Ann Coulter.
In HER piece on "narrative, "A Storyteller Loses the Storyline," she uses emasculating descriptive terminology such as this: "Instead of buoyant, he seems put upon. Instead of the fairy dust of hopefulness, there's the bitter draught of helplessness."
When Obama warned the huge crowds in Illinois on Memorial Day who'd turned out to see him at the veteran's cemetery during a terrible thunderstorm, that they could be struck by lightning and should wait in their cars, Dowd referred to it as "shooing people off the soggy field," and stated that when he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base later that night he was "tired-looking," and that the service people who were there to see him were "subdued" and had been "rounded up by the White House advance team."
"The oil won't stop flowing," she dug in, claws dripping, "but the magic has."
So, as an Obama supporter who has watched our beleaguered president, what are we supposed to do?
He has, in fact, accomplished more than any other president in his first year in office in modern memory, with the possible exception of FDR, and as he told Jonathan Alter for his book, "The Promise: President Obama, Year One- -FDR did face a Depression when he came into office, but he did NOT also face TWO WARS.
The health care reform legislation is, as Joe Biden put it so succinctly--a Big Fuckin' Deal. Financial Reform legislation is in sight. The Lilly Ledbetter Act is signed, sealed, and delivered, so to speak. The family planning ban on foreign aid has been lifted. More than 2.5 million acres of wilderness has been preserved for future generations. BP has been held accountable for billions in losses to the people on the Gulf. These are major accomplishments and are only a tip of the iceberg.
But all the media can obsess about is the stupid miserable "narrative" that Obama has apparently "lost."
Understand, the voters, by and large, don't really CARE about this stuff; however, there ARE things that we, as supporters, can do to reach out to voters and tell them our own damn story in such a way that they--unlike the pundit poo-bahs and the media mouthers--never will.
Turn to Part II and I'll show you how.
