{"id":17275,"date":"2012-10-10T12:37:40","date_gmt":"2012-10-10T17:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17275"},"modified":"2012-10-10T12:37:40","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T17:37:40","slug":"its-not-the-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/10\/10\/its-not-the-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s not the narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this month’s Reason<\/em> magazine, Peter Suderman<\/a> has an interesting story about Barack Obama and his obsession with narrative:<\/p>\n

Did Barack Obama ruin politics? Or did politics ruin Barack Obama? At this point, most Americans have made up their minds about the president one way or another. But even for people who think they know who the man in the Oval Office really is, it\u2019s easy to forget who he once was. <\/p>\n

Before running for political office, Barack Obama was a stubborn dreamer with a literary bent. Mostly he dreamed of living a better life story, even if that meant scrubbing away the blemishes of reality. Part of his appeal was the way he emerged from adversity unsullied. He was better than that. And with his help, we could be too.<\/p>\n

That was Obama\u2019s pitch to America. He would allow all of us to escape the mundane reality of politics, to live that better story with him, and erase the messiness of the past and present \u2014 just as he had done for himself. In Dreams from My Father<\/em>, Obama\u2019s 1995 book about his itinerant childhood and work as a community organizer in Chicago, the pre-presidential candidate recalls his grandfather\u2019s habit of rewriting uncomfortable truths about his own history in order to produce a better future. Obama, who as a child lived with his grandparents for many years, admits to picking up the habit himself: \u201cIt was this desire of his to obliterate the past,\u201d he writes, \u201cthis confidence in the possibility of remaking the world from whole cloth, that proved to be his most lasting patrimony.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama applied that very American tradition to politics. His campaigns would be about making the world a better place \u2014 more personable, less racially charged, more united in goals and respectful in temperament \u2014 more true, in other words, to the story we all wanted to believe about America. The ugliness of politics past would lose its grip on the reimagined future.<\/p>\n

But the power to imagine is not the power to accomplish. Vague, high-minded goals get sullied when translated into specific, practical policies. Nearly a full term of a moribund economy has turned the words hope and change into bitter punch lines. As time passes, the suspicion grows that the same narrative gift that made Obama so interesting and fresh in the mid-1990s contained the seeds of his failure as a president. Storytelling, it turns out, is no substitute for governance, and nothing ruins a promising writer faster than the practice of wielding power. As the allure of Obama\u2019s dreams wears off, so has the allure of his presidency. Obama promised to change politics; instead, politics changed him. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this month’s Reason magazine, Peter Suderman has an interesting story about Barack Obama and his obsession with narrative: Did Barack Obama ruin politics? Or did politics ruin Barack Obama? At this point, most Americans have made up their minds about the president one way or another. But even for people who think they know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,53,13],"tags":[158,188],"class_list":["post-17275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-electionwatch"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4uD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17276,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17275\/revisions\/17276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}