The Story of Barack Obama

Today, Barack Obama became the 44th President on the back of an incredibly powerful story. Some of these storylines are true and unassailable: the historicity of the first African American President. Others are the work of an incredibly skilled campaign team and a candidate who mastered the literary realm (and indeed, used it as the basis of his political career) as Reagan mastered stagecraft. Watching TV today reminds me of an immutable truth of our politics: above all else, we as Americans love a good story.

Oddly, this dynamic does not wind up devaluing issues and policies as you expect it might. When radical policies like the biggest expansion of government since FDR can be cloaked in a tableau of hope, change, and history, they are much easier to get through. Good storytelling is the natural ally of those who would like to see bold public policies -- on both sides.

Again and again in American politics, certain themes recur. And certain storylines are more successful than others. I went back and looked at Presidential elections since 1960 -- generally considered to be the birth of modern Presidential politics -- to see which storylines worked and which didn't, and it's not hard to see why Obama's trifecta of youth, change, and hope -- represented here by optimism, is so powerful: they've won every time they've been tried.

Here are the overall themes. I tried to boil down each candidate to a maximum of two main narratives: 

Here are the overall standings:

Beyond the uniqueness of Obama, it is not hard to see why people are so caught up in this moment. Obama comes into office on the back of some of the strongest and most resonant campaign themes in modern political history. Every time someone has adopted change as a central campaign theme, they've won.

This isn't because the political gurus overlooked the obvious, but because there are only so many themes you can run on depending on the political environment. If times are bad, change is an obvious theme -- but its relative non-use in major campaigns, I only call it for 1980, 1992, and 2008 -- suggests a basic aversion to change in the American electorate, especially since I count nine times in which an incumbent party has made a basic argument for continuity.

Opposition party candidates running in good times aren't left with many good options: they run on integrity -- honing in on opposition scandals, usually with mixed results: it worked for Bush in '00 and Carter in '76, but came off as flailing and desperate in '64 and '96, or voice poll-tested vanilla opposition themes stopping short of change (Kerry's strategists in '04 were were afraid of using the word "change" amidst a war). This last strategy always fails because the candidates themselves haven't done the hard work of finding a unique narrative. Candidates who lean heavily on their past record of service -- usually military but also long careers of public service -- fall victim to 1) a bias towards youth in presidential elections, and 2) the "what have you done for me lately?" question.

Likewise, continuity usually works as a theme because Presidents (or loyal VPs) are smart enough to know when to try it. Nixon, Humphrey (in the context of a three way race), and Gore were close enough to be able to try it. All three lost excruciatingly close races. All Presidents who have run explicitly on continuity have won re-election. 

Especially on the heels of a big change/mandate style election, running for re-election on continuity validates the initial change message. If the initial mandate isn't worth preserving, why exactly should you be re-hired?

It's when Presidents were first elected on narratives less sweeping than change that they run into trouble. Carter was not a huge muckraker in his '76 race from what I could tell -- he was a Southern social conservative who would "never lie to you." Yet once the stench of Watergate had passed, Carter had no rationale for staying in office. His rejecion of the "imperial Presidency" actually played into the spiral of pessimism that elected Reagan by reinforcing the idea of the smallness of the office and hence Jimmy Carter.

George H.W. Bush was essentially elected to continue the Reagan era, but quickly ran into the perception that he had run out of gas. George W. Bush prevailed into very close and idiosyncratic elections that did not set him up with a popular mandate. Bush in 2000 ran primarily on restoring honor and integrity, and on the sense that he wasn't like other Republicans -- so no mandate for a partisan Republican agenda could be claimed from the election itself, though Bush very skilfully generated one in legislative maneuvering after the fact. 9/11 pressed the reset button, and in 2004 he prevailed as Commander-in-Chief in a uniquely war-driven election of a kind not seen since 1944.

I don't know that a very clear theme for 2012 suggests itself from these patterns. If the economy turns around, Obama will seek to execute the classic change-continuity pivot that has traditionally been hard to beat. If we really are in Great Depression II, there is an opportunity for a Reagan-like mandate to emerge from 2012 because at some point the "hope" has to actually kick in. Whenever that opportunity emerges, however, what is clear from these historic patterns is that the Republican nominee be in a position to seek a broad change-driven mandate for conservative principles. If we want not just two-term Presidents, but popular two-term Presidents, you need someone who can lay claim to defining an era from its outset, aggressively re-assert that agenda for re-election, and ride it straight through eight years. Minimalist agendas of experience or personal integrity or pragmatism might work in individual elections, but they cost you in the long run once the immediate problems they were designed to fix are solved.

This is what today was about. Defining an era. It's a big gamble, and one that could blow up in Obama's face. But the theatrics are needed to give cover to big policy changes in a political system where change is designed to be difficult.