Time to retire the 'narrative' narrative

Prevailing liberal sentiment, conventional commentariat wisdom, cable-news' chronic diagnosis, the blogosphere's ruthlessly jackhammered cliche -- you may call it whatever you will, you may run from it, you are even free to dread its alarming (and alarmed) repetition, but by God you can never entirely escape it: 

The president and his advisers have at times done a mediocre job of telling the administration’s story. They need to better explain how individual decisions, such as delaying the controversial Keystone pipeline, fit into a coherent Big Picture of where the country needs to go.

That's from Eugene Robinson's latest column, although it could have come from most anyone who sits center-left of a keyboard with an Internet connection. Such musings have become a de rigueur paragraph of the modern major generalist. He no longer screams Get me rewrite! Now, it's Where's the Big Picture?

I can sympathize with this sentiment, but my sympathy rests on an increasingly steep and downward trajectory. I, too, back in 2009 and 2010, roughly, was of the wistful choir: the Obama administration could do a better job of Big Picture-painting and Grand Narrative-telling, especially on the shell-shocked battlefield of healthcare. It might be observed that the rather more important point to be made was that the Obama administration accomplished healthcare; but, then again, I'm a hopelessly incurable pragmatist. At any rate, the commentariat's narrative on Obama's lack of one soon became the chic, alternative observation. My tolerance for it began to diminish, however, when Congressional Democrats -- many of whom had also been pushing the "no narrative" narrative -- themselves refused to nationalize the 2010 elections within a coherent narrative, contrary to the Obama administration's urgings.

What's more, the 2012 election soon loomed, which, reasonably enough, meant Obama's 2012 campaign loomed. And what's a campaign? It's a Grand Narrative. But kick-starting it in 2011 -- that annus horribilis awash in GOP apoplexies, in which the cable networks were investing the mother lode of their voyeuristic airtime -- would have eclipsed any emphatic narrative of 2012.

Better to bide one's time; better to wait for a better journalistic reception -- one not quite so saturated in the coverage of a Republican Party unhinged.   

In sum, Obama's been playing the long game. Which has worked, to the best of my recollection, most every time. One would think that prevailing liberal sentiment and conventional commentariat wisdom, etc., etc., would have caught on to this staggeringly manifest and strikingly successful presidential strategy by now. But, I guess that's not how they play their game.

Comments

[Peter G]

Damn it is nice to read commentary that does not insult the intelligence. I realize that columnists have columns to fill and I like Mr Robinson but I think your analysis is on point. I would rather like to add my own observation however and that relates to the concept of the Big Picture. The so called Big Picture viewed as a sum of individual decisions must necessarily include all the political calculation of what is possible, politically useful in trade and desirable. And expecting any politician to be publicly honest about that is foolish. In fact no politician can possibly put forward anything but a narrative that does not include much of the political calculation but nevertheless justifies the end result of the decision making process. Would it really do any good for the president to lay out for the "progressives" exactly why they did not and could not obtain their heart's desire in the ACA. What good would it do? What narrative was it even possible to construct regarding the birth of ACA that did not contain so much dreary political sludge it looked liked melamine laced Chinese dog food. Yet the end result does speak for itself.

[W. Caulfield]

I simply like reading any commentary with a Gilbert & Sullivan reference.