August 28, 2010
HE HAD A NARRATIVE...:
The great Obama-Axelrod-etc. mystery (Michael Tomasky, 8/28/10, The Guardian)
Here's one of the big questions, really, one to chew on over the weekend, one that's asked a lot around this town. How could a bunch of people who ran such a brilliant campaign be doing such a lousy job at the politics of governing? [...]I think you have to walk into the White House with a long-arc narrative strategy: here's where we want to be in three months, six months, nine months, etc. Now, maybe they did that, and the economy just shot all that to hell. But there's little sign they did that. And I think that the state of the economy is only partly determinative of the narrative.
In other words, you know coming in: okay, we're a new administration, black president, big-city guy, we saw the campaign they ran, they're basically gonna do that: liberal liberal out of touch out of touch big government big government and so on. So you plan things that undercut that narrative.
...it's just that in its entirety it stated the following: Barack Obama is elected president.
