I am, by trade, a story teller.\u00a0 Unlike some yarn spinners, it’s my job to tell tales that are as true and accurate as I can make them, and to make sure that the people in the story — not my own imagination — shape the narrative.<\/p>\n
All of which means that I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, about the world.<\/p>\n
In a very real way, that’s what a big presidential campaign is, a yarn-fest.\u00a0 It’s a group of people sitting around a fire, listening as different people who would like to lead our tribe tell us a story about our future.<\/p>\n
Now politicians generally have an even more difficult relationship with the truth than journalists do.\u00a0 To make their stories vivid and believable and enticing, they bend the facts, spruce up the details, and gloss over the ugly bits.<\/p>\n
Most days, it’s my job as a reporter to poke at the gaps and the downright deceptions in the tales they tell.\u00a0 But today I want to think out loud a bit about the stories themselves.<\/p>\n
First, let’s take President Barack Obama.\u00a0 His tale goes something like this.<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, there was a group of careless, roughneck yahoos who ran the United States so poorly that they drove our country straight into a ditch.\u00a0 The villains of this story — the Republican Party — didn’t pay close enough attention to the details, and so they got us tangled up in costly and unnecessary wars.\u00a0 Their crummy policies also allowed the economy to run off the rails.\u00a0 According to his story, Barack Obama is the sheriff who cleaned things up again.\u00a0 He ran the roughnecks out of town, put some common sense rules back in place, and put America back on a path toward something like a sustainable recovery.\u00a0 The happy ending of this story is a country where a reasonably powerful Federal government continues to serve as a moderating force, helping people in true need, and preventing lawlessness, whether it be by out-of-control banks or evil terrorists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
All in all, it’s not a bad story.\u00a0 It’s a fairly moderate sort of tale.\u00a0 So far, about 47% of Americans seem to like it enough to vote Mr. Obama a second term.<\/p>\n
Now let’s look at Mitt Romney’s story:<\/p>\n
Once upon a time, there was a group of noble American workers, small businessmen, entrepreneurs and job creators, who built the world’s mightiest, most creative economy.\u00a0 But those hard-working souls ran smack against a cabal of unions, environmentalists, public sector employees, meddling politicians and government regulators, who threw up bureaucratic obstacles and raised taxes until the great American engine faltered.\u00a0 The villains of this story — the Democrats — embraced the notion of a “dependency” society.\u00a0 By cutting taxes, by helping to make the rich even richer, and by reducing the power of government significantly, the true strength of our capitalist society will re-emerge\u00a0 The happy ending of this story is a country where cutting programs and services doesn’t produce more poverty or despair, but instead inspires people to get out and do for themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This, too, is a compelling story, and so far about 46% of Americans seem to like it well enough that they’d like to see Mitt Romney in the White House.<\/p>\n
As a story-teller myself, I’m going to venture an argument that in the long run, Mr. Romney’s tale has more oomph and more power.<\/p>\n
Why?\u00a0 Because it’s aspirational.\u00a0 It is, in a big corporation sort of way, idealistic.\u00a0 It envisions a future where Americans will be liberated to create and produce and compete, and it suggests that all our failures have been caused by black hats in Washington.<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama’s story is more technocratic.\u00a0 It paints a picture of an America where the party’s over, there’s a big mess, and now it’s time to clean it up — one dreary chore, one complicated reform, at a time.<\/p>\n
Again, I’m not weighing in here on whose story is “right” or more “true.”\u00a0 But I do think that unless Mr. Obama can find a more compelling vision, a more enticing tale to tell, he faces a long, painful slog to November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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