Still Waiting for the Narrator in Chief

Illustration by Matt Dorfman. Original photograph by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/Getty Images.

Presidents generally don't like to admit mistakes, so it was interesting when Barack Obama owned up to one during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS last summer. It was the job of the president, Obama said, to "tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism," and it was on this score that he had fallen short. Conservatives gleefully mocked the president, saying that the country needed jobs more than it needed stories, and the remark did seem to hint at some genuine denial. After 40-plus months of high unemployment, a president who thinks his mistakes rest not in his policy choices but rather in his ability to articulate them is probably telling himself a story, if no one else.

And yet Obama's admission resonated with his supporters, who can be forgiven for wondering why he hasn't been better at promoting what is, by any standard, an impressive series of accomplishments. (As the comedian Chris Rock tweeted recently: "Only Pres Obama could prevent a depression, end a war, get bin Laden, bring unemployment below 8 percent, then be told he can't run on his record.") In books and speeches before he became president, Obama showed himself to be an evocative storyteller; even the controversy over his memoir, in which Obama condensed some characters into one, says something about his narrative sophistication, his novelistic instinct for developing themes and characters that make his point.

All of which makes it even more baffling that Obama's presidential alter-ego, this grayer and more somber version of his literary self, spent the past four years immersed in legislative minutiae and marching out dull slogans — "an economy built to last," "winning the future" and so on — while failing to advance any larger theory of the moment confronting the country and what it required. "They haven't talked about how the pieces of the puzzle fit together and move us forward from where we've been," says Don Baer, who served as President Clinton's communications director and now runs the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. "It's been random and unconnected." David Gergen, who advised four presidents on communications, likens the larger story of an administration to a clothesline. "You adopt your clothesline, and then you hang all your policies from it," he told me. "They're missing the clothesline."

If Obama somehow manages to lose an election that seemed well within his grasp a few months ago, this question of how he squandered his narrative mojo will pain Democrats for years to come. As with so much else about this presidency, the answers can probably be traced back to those first overwhelming months after the 2008 election. Remember that John McCain's most effective line of attack against Obama during the campaign was that he was more of a motivational speaker than a leader. And so, having won the election and facing crises on several fronts, the president's advisers were understandably wary of too much speechifying, which might have underscored the idea that Obama was going to orate his way through the presidency while leaving the business of governing to others. As a result, Obama spent much of his first months — the period when he might have been speaking directly to an anxious public, much as Franklin Roosevelt did in a less technological age — holed up with aides and members of Congress, rather than pushing any kind of overarching narrative.

Remember, too, that Obama and Joe Biden were the first president and vice president to be elected directly from the Senate since 1960, and most of the senior aides they brought with them came from Capitol Hill. This had real consequences. Congressional aides know a lot about how to slap around their opponents, but because they're always either taking direction from a president or trying to thwart one, they think very little about how to build support for a governing agenda. A classic case here was the controversial stimulus measure passed in the early days of Obama's presidency; the White House and its allies skillfully managed to win approval for nearly $800 billion in aid to states, long-term investment and tax cuts, but they gave almost no thought to whether the public understood the differences between these categories of spending or the economic reasoning behind them.

Matt Bai is the magazine's chief political correspondent. He last wrote about the economy in Ohio.

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