The Importance of Narrative
Posted by Sam on September 7, 2008
The left has enjoyed jabbing at John McCain’s repeated references to his time as a Prisoner of War in the Hanoi Hilton, most notably with former President Jimmy Carter’s comments during the Democratic Convention in Denver in which he claimed that the Republican Presidential nominee was “milking” his five and a half years in hell for political gain. And now with Sarah Palin’s rise to the Vice Presidential spot turning the Republican ticket into a true exemplification of the American Dream, the Democrats have resorted to calling her a hick with a great personal story but no policy knowledge or experience. The more intelligent Dems on the news networks are smart enough to stay away from the overt smears, and instead accuse McCain and Palin of talking to much about their “narratives” and not enough about policy, for example, during their convention speeches.
But narrative matters. Not as a marketing tool or cheap attempt to “relate” to voters, but as an insight into the formative experiences a person has had and thus a window into how they may make decisions. While George Will argues that we want exceptional and elite men and women leading us, we don’t face a one-or-the-other choice between authoritarian aristocracy and the blind leading the blind. Indeed, narrative is more important than policy, especially for the Republicans: an almost-assuredly more Democratic Congress will meet the next president, so McCain’s policy proposals will be significantly subverted by this liberal majority. But for both tickets, the President is not an autocrat. Effected policies will look very different from proposed policies as they work through the legislative process, and so all the talk about policy during the campaign pertains to a starting point, while narrative pertains to follow-through; policy talk pertains to objectives, while narrative pertains to the processes by which objectives are obtained.
It is for this reason that the McCain camp is dead-on when they say that they bring the experience necessary to change Washington: the Republican nominees’ background as a tested war hero and modern-day Cinderella tell us that they are level-headed yet shrewd, idealistic yet grounded in reality, while Obama brings high hopes but no plans by which to instantiate them.
