STORY TIME:

No Confidence: a review of Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President by Ron Suskind (John B. Judis, October 13, 2011, New Republic)

In the winter of 2011, Obama sat down for interviews with Suskind. Presidential interviews tend to be inconsequential, but not in this case. As Suskind requested that Obama talk about what the latter had learned in his first two years in office, it became apparent--at least to this reader--that he had learned very little. In explaining his difficulties, Obama singled out a failure of communication. "The area in my presidency where I think my management and understanding of the presidency evolved most, and where I think we made the most mistakes, was less on the policy front and more on the communications front," Obama said. "I think I was so consumed with the problems in front of me that I didn't step back and remember, What is the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do? And what the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people about where we are and where we are going."

In his interviews, Obama kept reverting to the same idea. The reason that he and his advisors had not been able to agree on a jobs program after unemployment began rising in December 2009 was that they didn't "have a clean story that we wanted to tell against which we would measure various actions." And he complained that "what was required to save the economy might not always match up with what would make for a good story." I hadn't heard this kind of language about storytelling for a decade. I first heard it from Democratic political consultants and activists in the 1980s. Unable to fathom Reagan's continued popularity, they attributed it to his ability as an actor to frame his actions as a story. By telling an effective story, a politician could overcome the potential unpopularity of his views. He could convince voters to accept the discomforts of the present in the hope of a comfortable future.

Obama was using the concept of political storytelling in exactly the same way. True to form, he invoked Roosevelt and Reagan's success. Roosevelt was able to remain popular even though "three-quarters of the things he did didn't work," because "he was able to project ... 'we are going to get through this.'" That was his story. Obama, Suskind, explained, admired "Reagan's ability to project optimism when there may be no definable reason to be optimistic." Reagan, Obama said, "was very comfortable in playing the role of president. And I think part of that really was his actor's background." Citing Reagan's mastery of symbols and gestures, Obama remarked that "going forward as president, the symbols and gestures--what people are seeing coming out of this office--are at least as important as the policies we put forward."

What can one say about the sheer silliness of this? Stories, symbols, and catchwords are important, but they merely dramatize how a politician sees the country and what a politician hopes to do. They can enliven what he wants to do--but if what he wants to do runs contrary to what people want, or what can be done, and if the results of his policies do not measure up to what he promises, and what people want, then even the most artful prose cannot rescue a president. [...]

Suskind's book is being widely portrayed as critical of the Obama administration, but if you read the entire book, its message is that during Obama's first two years he was foiled by his own inexperience as a manager and by a staff that didn't do good by him...

Taken together there's some insight here.  The story that Mr, Obama ran on was an anti-story.  He and his team had to make sure that he was a creature completely devoid of substance so that he could appear all things to all people annoyed at the GOP.  He was nothing more than what he was not--W and the House GOP.  This was made easier not just by the creepy fact that he does seem to lack personal substance but by his lack of any experience doing anything meaningful.  After all, had he ever done anything then that would have shaped a view of who he was.  Instead he was able to run as a cipher.  

Of course, had he wanted to do anything with his presidency, and were he confident in his own leadership, he'd have surrounded himself with an effective executive management team, as W did when he populated the top ranks of his government with former chiefs of staff and ex-governors--as many as a half dozen of whom could have stepped in and assumed the presidency themselves without the country missing a beat.  Mr. Obama, on the other hand, sits in Cabinet meetings where no one, including himself, is qualified for the chief executive job.

But now he's been in office for three years and so there is a story to tell, about what he's done, Obama's forgotten triumphs (Suzanne Mettler, 10/15/11, Salon)

The first major piece of legislation that Obama had signed into law, the stimulus bill of February 2009, included a vast array of tax cuts: They totaled $288 billion, 37 percent of the cost of the entire bill. Among them, the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, one of his campaign promises, reduced income taxes for 95 percent of all working Americans. Yet one year after the law went into effect, when pollsters queried the public about whether the Obama administration had raised or lowered taxes for most Americans, only 12 percent answered correctly that taxes had decreased; 53 percent mistakenly thought taxes had stayed the same; and 24 percent even believed they had increased!

Healthcare reform represented Obama's chief policy goal, and he expended a vast amount of political capital in pursuing it over his first 15 months in office. But in April 2010, just weeks after he signed the healthcare bill that extended coverage to the vast majority of working-age Americans and prohibited insurance companies from denying coverage to people who are ill, 55 percent of the public reported that they would describe their feelings about it as "confused."

That same legislative package also contained sweeping changes in student aid policy that aimed to help more people attend college and complete degrees. Yet when Americans were asked how much they had heard about these changes, only 26 percent reported "a lot," while 40 percent said "a little," and fully 34 percent said "nothing at all."

All told, the public seemed largely oblivious to the president's major policy accomplishments.

As Mr. Judis says, telling a story about what you've done does you no good if the voters don't like what you've done. Cutting taxes would be a decent message, were it not for thirty years of Democratic rhetoric opposing tax cuts and the President's active opposition to further tax cuts.  Getting more people into college might be a decent message were not there a national conversation going on about the value of college and the harms of assuming debt to attend. 

Which leaves nothing but health care reform, which is sort of the opposite of candidate Obama, being so substantive, comprehensive and detailed that everyone can find something about it to hate.  And when your "story" consists of defending every unpopular piece of your signature "achievement" you obviously aren't presenting a compelling narrative.

That is to say, there isn't a compelling internal narrative, but there is a compelling one that we can impose from without: what we have is a man too inexperienced for the job he's in, surrounded by purposely inept staff, wasting his time fighting to defend a mistake to the exclusion of moving forward on any other policies.  Try running on that story in 2012.





Posted by oj at October 16, 2011 9:51 AM
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