Greater Democracy: Political Narratives, Dead Cats, Lame Ducks and the Expectation Game.

June 16, 2006

Political Narratives, Dead Cats, Lame Ducks and the Expectation Game.

Columbia Journalism Review Daily Traces the Birth of a Narrative. They talk about how cable news reporters and pundits are questioning whether the tide is turning for Bush. They comment, “How are they answering themselves? It's a mixed bag. But if a question gets asked often enough in the media, the answer begins to (almost) not matter. And before long the question mark is dropped entirely and a narrative is born.”

They sum up the discussion with “And there it is, in the blink of an eye, so fast that you might have missed it: A narrative is born.”

I lived on a sailboat for several years and one thing you learn on a boat is that the tide changes four times a day.

Another phrase that people use is if Bush is experiencing a “bounce”. Here, I go back to my experiences on Wall Street. When a market has experienced a sharp decline, similar to how Bush’s approval has declined, everyone looks for any positive uptick. The question that always gets asked is if we are experiencing a market reversal, or if the uptick is merely a “dead cat bounce”.

This goes back to the old saying in investing that even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from high enough. When a market experiences a dead cat bounce, there is a brief respite from the downward trend, but the downward trend resumes before you know it.

Is Bush a dead cat? A lame duck? Perhaps the emergence of another narrative gives us a little insight into this. Staying with the Wall Street focus, today’s Wall Street Journal asks, Will 2006 Reprise 1994? This question keeps getting asked and as with the other narrative, ”the answer begins to (almost) not matter”

The narratives feed into another part of the political process, the expectations game. If Bush can claw his way back to only 40% perhaps, Republicans think, maybe they can change the other polls about a plurality of voters thinking we would be better off if Democrats controlled Congress. Of course this 40% is a low expectation compared to Clinton’s 48% approval rating in 1994.

Yet all of this still stays with the horse race narratives. We really need to be talking about narratives around how we will get back to having a government of, by, and for the people.

Posted by Aldon Hynes at June 16, 2006 11:19 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Aldon,

I am in complete agreement. Bush has been very successful in selling us a "story" that is at best irrelevant and is most likely extremely dangerous.

Consider this, if the environment upon which we depend has a significant chance of changing very substantially in ways that will make life on earth a great deal more challenging, then you might expect this to be a strong component of the important political stories we tell ourselves.

As you know, there is extremely good scientific evidence that the environment is being badly destabilized by the release of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. If you have any doubts, I highly recommend the new Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth".

After you watch "An Inconvenient Truth", you will understand that we need a Grand National Challenge to keep the CO2 in the atmosphere below 500 parts per million. Al Gore does not actually mention 500 PPM, but the excellent presentation made by Joe Romm at MIT on May 13th does. Find it here http://www.mitenergyconference.com/proceedings.htm on the Archives page.

It is interesting to note that one of the key aspects of the Bush political story is that we need to give substantial subsidies, direct and indirect, to the oil and gas energy sectors. Which is to say that the Bush story tells us to create incentives to release sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.

Frankly, giving subsidies to the companies that profit from releasing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is like giving a patient with active and advancing cancer a drug that will accelerate their pain, suffering and early death. Illogical! If not pathological and immoral.

How, then, would we perceive the Bush story if we viewed sequestered carbon as major cause of cancer? Worse than cigarette smoke. Would we support its release into the atmosphere? Much less support a government telling us a story that we must use our tax dollars to increase the rate of release of this very dangerous sequestered carbon? From this point of view, the current Bush political story is very bad for us and the the future of our children. It is worse than irrelevant.

The question is why is the rapidly changing condition of the environment NOT a part of all major political stories? Why are the bloggers not telling this new story? Is it possible that the promoters of "Internet powered politics" simply do not understand that technology without a compelling and useful story is meaningless?

Posted by: Jock Gill at June 17, 2006 10:39 AM

Aldon,

Frank Rich also agrees with you. In his op-ed in today's NY Times he writes:

"What's most impressive about Mr. Rove, however, is not his ruthlessness, it's his unshakable faith in the power of a story. The story he's stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won't lose at the polls if there's no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won't tell their own. And they don't — whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans'.

What's needed, wrote Michael Tomasky in an influential American Prospect essay last fall, is a "big-picture case based on core principles." As he argued, Washington's continued and inhumane failure to ameliorate the devastation of Katrina could not be a more pregnant opportunity for the Democrats to set forth a comprehensive alternative to the party in power. Another opportunity, of course, is the oil dependence that holds America hostage to the worst governments in the Middle East.

Instead the Democrats float Band-Aid nostrums and bumper-sticker marketing strategies like "Together, America Can Do Better." As the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, "The very ungrammaticality of the Democrats' slogan reminds you that this is a party with a chronic problem of telling a coherent story about itself, right down to an inability to get its adverbs and subjects to agree." On Wednesday Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were to announce their party's "New Direction" agenda — actually, an inoffensive checklist of old directions (raise the minimum wage, cut student loan costs, etc.) — that didn't even mention Iraq. Symbolically enough, they had to abruptly reschedule the public unveiling to attend Mr. Bush's briefing on his triumphant trip to Baghdad."

The interesting question is whether the Demcrats, as currently constituted, have the capability to develop a new and compelling political story map?

Posted by: Jock Gill at June 18, 2006 11:01 AM