A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation—but none of these things will matter a wit if the President cannot couch his vision, his policies, his courage, his will, his plan in the idiom of story. It is hard to feel invested in a terrible story or a confused story or, in the case of the current Administration, no story at all. Obama needs to craft a strong story, and fast, if he expects to be able to accomplish anything in the three years that remain. His opponents are hard at work smithing their stories, and Obama soon might find himself surrounded on all sides by crude powerful tales that no amount of ratiocination will be able to dispel. The President needs to remember his post’s true vocation: that of the Storyteller-in-Chief.
The whole post is worth reading in full. However, Junot seems baffled as to why Obama has not told a story. Indeed, I think many American writers were ecstatic at the possibility of an Obama presidency precisely because he was a real writer, a real storyteller. And in the case of the last eight years leading up to the financial collapse, the narrative for Obama to tell is so unbelievably obvious that for him to be unaware of it is simply impossible. So why hasn't he told one? Because any good story--by it's very nature, is ideological. Any good story uses its characters and their actions to tell us something about human nature, and by extension, about morality. It involves framing a character's actions so that the reader perceives the consequences as either good or bad, productive or destructive, right or wrong. By extension this involves casting particular characters as heroes and villains. Clearly, we of the so-called literary class value stories that blur these binaries, which reveal things that we like to refer to as "the grey area," "paradox," "ambiguity," and so on. But such stories have little value in a political context. Stories that move massive numbers of people to action have traditionally been rather black and white. Their brilliance comes not from burrowing into a small slice of the world and revealing its complexity, but by taking the sprawling series of events over a period of years and streamlining them into a simple, emotionally charged narrative. For Obama to tell convincing story would require him to cast various political actors as heroes and villains. And this is conflicts with something fundamental (and I believe, detrimental) to his presidency: his sincere desire for bipartisanship. He genuinely wants to work with Republicans even as he moves the country left. The problem is that in order to move the country left he needs to cast Republicans in the role of the villain. He needs to state unequivocally that Republican's vision for America has, for the last 25 years, caused median incomes to stagnate while the wealth at the top has exploded. Such rhetoric is, quite rightly, viewed as partisan. One could not blame Republicans--many of whom sincerely believe in their conservative vision for society--to view Obama as an existential threat, a man who enters their land to proclaim that conservatives believe in a false God. You don't negotiate with a man who publicly pronounces your ideology morally bankrupt and fundamentally dysfunctional. None of us would negotiate with a man like that, unless--perhaps--our very survival depended on it. Obama--being the gifted empathizer that he is--certainly knows this. And so what does he do? He presents policies which do move the country in a more progressive direction, but fails to defend them with a narrative that explains why such a direction is necessary. Because the other thing he definitely wants to do--however naive many of us think it--is to bring opposing sides together around a common cause. In other words, he wants to mediate the partisan divide. Well, any mediator will tell you that not villainizing either side is a pre-requisite to successful mediation. If you cast someone as a villain they will behave as a villain. But this is already happening. Republicans already perceive Obama as a threat to their existential survival. They already have no problem dissembling and obstructing. And this--I believe is where Obama may actually be naive: he doesn't want to believe that moving the country leftward will inescapably terrify the conservative movement, that they will perceive HIM as a villain no matter what and will tell a story to the public in which he and the democratic majority are taking the country down a radical path. Obama hasn't done the same thing because he knows the destructiveness of such a narrative, that once you cast your opposition in that light it cements the conflict and destroys any chance of compromise. But the problem is that Obama is also telling a story about his presidency bringing transformational change to the country, and the basic goals of this change are liberal ones: a more equal society, stronger labor laws, higher wages for lower income folks, and a larger role for government to enact these changes. This is an existential threat to conservatism and if Obama wants to make these changes he needs to tell a story with heroes and villains, with good and evil, a story that strikes the majority of Americans at their own existential core and gives them a story they can tell themselves about why Obama is doing what he is doing, why certain people hate it, and why those people who hate it are fundamentally wrong.
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