"The Narrative"

A penetrating angle on the wider significance of the Denver debate comes this morning from Jean Kaufman:

In the very best postmodern fashion, Obama and his supporters have relied on a narrative about Obama that has been carefully constructed. He’s brilliant, a great writer, a rare thinker, a moderate, a first-class temperament with neatly pressed pants, a uniter, a cool guy who’s unflappable.

The first debate last Wednesday threatened to make that narrative seem absurd. You might say that the narrative got mugged by reality, and an awful lot of people were watching while it happened.

But the next day there was a new narrative in place — or rather, several narratives: Romney cheated, the altitude was too high for Obama, he didn’t have time to practice because he was too busy with weighty matters, Romney lied, and look at those great unemployment numbers!

Those numbers themselves are another narrative, one that no one can quite figure out because there’s a disparity between one part of the stats and other parts. In a very real sense, the numbers don’t seem to add up. But they’re good for the Obama narrative, unless you think too deeply about them.

But one of the points of a narrative is not to think too deeply about it.

"The narrative" is, of course, a story: fiction. But fiction has a better track record for swaying people to a point of view than any other method of getting them there. That's because good fiction mimics the causal mechanisms of reality in a fashion the reader finds plausible and appealing.

If you can remember the "Killian memos" fraud late in the 2004 election, you might also remember this classic post-mortem statement by one on the periphery of the deceits: "The facts were wrong but the narrative was right." The "facts," in this instance, consisted of a set of forged memos critical of George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. The "narrative" the Left, through its media annex at CBS, was attempting to buttress was that of a spoiled rich kid with heavy-duty political connections -- the young George W. Bush, of course -- getting a free ride for conduct that would have gotten other young TexANG lieutenants tossed out of the service, if not into a stockade.

When the memos were revealed via typographical analysis as fraudulent, the narrative took a body blow. The scheme, intended to help propel John Kerry's presidential campaign over the finish line, probably harmed the challenger instead, through guilt by association. But that didn't decrease the Left's belief in the power of a well-constructed, well-supported narrative -- nor should it have.

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In my book on the storyteller's art, I lay heavy emphasis on what "the story" really is: the causal tissue that links the events depicted, not the "bare" events themselves. Herein lies the heart of persuasion: if your narrative comes acceptably close to the reader's sense for causality -- "the way things work," as he sees the world -- it can persuade. Indeed, it can convince, as politically oriented fiction from Looking Backward to Atlas Shrugged has demonstrated.

However, you cannot get people to accept a narrative that's too plainly at odds with their sense of "the way things work." If that's your intention, you're going to need a lot of carefully constructed scaffolding around your set, to disguise those aspects of the context and the situation that are at odds with your plot.

The Obama camp has had to conceal so much of The Won's past because it needed to present a narrative that's largely at odds with the average American's sense for "the way things work." Now that the implications of that narrative -- in particular, of Obama's superior intelligence, competence, and eloquence -- are being contradicted by events that cannot be concealed, a substantial number of Americans have started to ask what facts about him have been withheld from their eyes.

The inverse is occurring in the Romney campaign. The Left and its media allies have done everything possible to smear Romney as a caricature of a Nineteenth-Century "robber baron" capitalist:

Let's leave aside that the whole "robber baron" thing is a figment of left-leaning historians' imaginations. The image is well cemented into altogether too many Americans' minds. What matters is the distaste the image elicits toward anyone who appears to fit it. The Left strained to present the public with exactly that portrait of Romney. The Denver debate cross-cut it brutally, causing the collapse of that aspect of their narrative undertaking.

Given its reliance on fabricated narratives these last few decades, we must expect the Left to attempt a new fiction immediately. My hope is that there isn't enough time (or enough unexploited slanders) for that; theirs, of course, is that they can sleaze together enough new innuendoes into a coherent tale of venality to undercut the fresh image of Mitt Romney as a man of solid American convictions and substantial, honorable achievements.

This will bear watching, particularly as regards the extent to which Obama's advisors and overt boosters can lead the Mainstream Media into a new channel of attack. The major media cannot help but be aware that their credibility with private Americans is at a historic low. They might not be entirely willing to cooperate with further political exploitation. We shall see.