"What Happened to Obama's Passion?"

[ellenkushner]

This opinion piece in the New York Times by Drew Westen (August 7, 2011) really stuck in my mind; I agree with him that storytelling was critical to Obama's election, and that most people are ruled in their hearts by narrative.  Since I really do believe this, his piece - and please read it! - makes me very, very, very sick and sad at the opportunities lost.

A rebuttal in the New Republic helped me balance things a bit.

But I still suspect Westen's right.  

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_stranger_here/]

Right there with you.

(Edited to get rid of annoyingly hyper gif icon.)

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Viewing the US from the outside, I find Chait's response more convincing than Westen's essay. Your government doesn't seem to be set up for the sort of leadership Westen likes to be effective. But it's not surprising I think this, because I get a lot of my views of US domestic politics from Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog, which is liberal in outlook but deeply pragmatic about what is logistically possible, and he agrees with Chait. This rings very true to me: "[people who] write about politics professionally like to criticize political rhetoric because they are specialists in political rhetoric. Rhetoric is what they do for a living. And so they have a natural tendency to talk about what they know and overestimate the power of what they do. It’s a lot harder to confidently criticize economic policy, or legislative strategy, or foreign-policy decision making, much less to confidently analyze realistic counterfactuals in those areas."

This is not to say Klein never thinks Obama could have done more -- one of Klein's current themes, which makes a lot of sense to me, is that Obama could and should have insisted that the post-debt-ceiling supercommittee commit to measures that the CBO agree will create x million new jobs. But that's a policy issue, not so much a rhetoric issue.

[paulakate.livejournal.com]

As Chait points out, Westen's view of the importance of storytelling may be influenced by the fact that Westen is himself a storyteller. I would expect Westen's assessment to resonate with those of us who are storytellers, or otherwise reliant on story to make sense of the world.

One way evil can win in the world is to undermine our faith in good men.

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

I think there's a bit of an Icarus effect here--people had such great hopes for Obama and are missing how much he has accomplished because it isn't as much as they hoped he would accomplish. They forget how much he has had to deal with, and how little support he had to work with. Even with the so-called "supermajority," the barely adequate stimulus passed by only one vote. And now he's stuck working with Tea Party Republicans who would rather kamikaze their own careers to bring him down.

I do wish the President would've spent more time talking to the American people--and that he would've been a little more honest when trying to show us that vision. For example, I've long felt that the whole "car in the ditch" speech in the mid-term elections would have gone over a lot better if he'd said "now that the car is HALFWAY out of the ditch," instead of trying to persuade us that the car really was out of the ditch, when for many people (and possibly the nation as a whole) it wasn't, just yet.

But those are failings of rhetoric. While I'm not as thrilled as I'd like to be with the state of the nation right now, I also don't expect my elected officials to agree with me on every issue, and I think Obama is a very gifted leader doing the best he can with what very little he's got.

[gows.livejournal.com]

Perhaps a little off-topic, but this (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&smid=fb-share) article made me think a lot about the sort of decision-making pressure Obama's under, and why he has perhaps made some of the choices he has.