One week ago, a grueling Presidential election ended and the post-election analysis began.
These analyses ranged from an over-analysis of the most tweeted photo in Twitter history to conservative analysis on how to rebuild the GOP's appeal to liberal analysis of white male America. Perhaps the most compelling analysis of the elections results, at least for Flannista, is one forwarded to me by treesta: "The secret to Barack Obama's survival", a blog post by Washington Post writer, Greg Sargent, in which Sargent makes a compelling case that Obama won because his re-election team knew how to tell a story -- a narrative that eclipsed the profound re-election hurdles facing Obama:
- Inheriting an economy in free fall that proved to be deeper and more intractable than anything since the Great Depression.
- Facing an extraorinarily determined opposition that sought to deliberately deny Obama any cooperation of any kind.
- Being the target of an unprecedented barrage of hundreds and hundred of millions in outside ad spending.
Faced with this, Obama's team knew that Obama would only win if he ran, again, according to Sargent, "a scorched earth campaign designed to tear apart his opponent. But the Obama team also married this to an uplifting narrative about Obama that appropriated the very economic and political obstacles he faced."
What Obama's team did was to choose a storyline; specifically, this storyline: Obama fights for middle class families. Why? Because independents revealed by 54% to 40% that they'd rather have a President who is willing to "fight for middle class families" rather than one who has a "'technical understanding of the economy." The picture (however inaccurate) of Obama's willingness to fight for an economy and future that many wanted trumped what many perceived as Romney's unwillingness to fight on their behalf. Unfortunately, the Romney narrative ("I'm not worried about that 47%") unwittingly conspired to reinforce Obama's narrative.
Click here to read Sargent's entire blog post.
This is not a post advocating a political position, but rather a post about the power of stories. In a December 2007 Harvard Business Review article, "The Four Truths of the Storyteller," Peter Guber writes:
State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in "state-of-the-heart" technology.
The analyses of the 2012 Presidential election will undoubtedly continue, but perhaps they ought to stop altogether. Perhaps they ought not to be analyses at all. Perhaps political pundits on all sides need to shut their mouths and open their hearts to citizens across the country yearning to hear these words:
Once upon a time . . .
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