How About a Story We Can Believe In?

Two excerpts from the New Yorker news desk today. First, Junot Diaz:

It has always seemed to me that one of a President’s primary responsibilities is to be a storyteller. We all know the importance of narratives, of stories; they are part of the reasons our brains are so damn big. We need stories, we thrive on them, stories are how we shape our universe. Tolkien could have been talking about the power of stories when he described his One Ring: stories rule us, they find us, they bring us together, they bind us, and, yes, they can pull us apart as well. If a President is to have any success, if his policies are going to gain any kind of traction among the electorate, he first has to tell us a story. . . .

But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

Philip Gourevitch:

A year ago, I stood at the back of the shivering crowd that massed on the Mall in Washington to watch Obama’s swearing in. You could barely see the Capital from where I stood, almost a mile away—but that didn’t stop the passionate frozen faces around me from lifting up to hang on every word that boomed from the speakers at the foot of the Washington Monument. They had come hoping for some of that old Obama magic—and what he gave them instead was a promise of the grim hard slog ahead. Now people are saying that he needs to take a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook and go out selling that snap-in-the-step morning-in-America mojo again. But how about if he simply asks: Is the country better off than it was a year ago? Hell yes. And it’s in crisis. So to judge this first year, we can’t only remember the past eight years, we have to wait for the next year and the one after that and the one after that. The next year starts where the first year ended, with health-care reform—and the President has to take more forceful and unrelenting leadership on insuring that the bill is passed than ever before now that his congressional caucus is in such disarray. If he doesn’t use his power in every way to possible to win this fight, he will have lost a great deal. But, either way, you can think Obama’s doing pretty well or pretty awfully today, but you have to see that he’s just getting started.

More short pieces on Obama's first year from New Yorker staff here.