In an interview with Emmitt Miller of Black Entertainment Television (BET), President Obama was asked what he would have done differently. The first thing Obama said is if he had had “better information” he would have better prepared the American people for how difficult the recession would be. And then  Obama said this:

The other thing that you know as I reflect on it is in the first year or so we spent a lot of time just doing the right thing and not worrying about selling what we were doing. And I think that the more you’re in this office the more you have to say to yourself that telling a story to the American people is just as important as the actual policies that you’re implementing. And they’ve got to have a sense of where it is that we’re going to go, particularly during hard times. [emphasis added]

Set aside the claim by Obama that he spent so much of his time “just doing the right thing” (clearly he wasn’t; his economic policies are by almost any measure, including his own, abject failures) and that he didn’t worry about “selling” his policies (Obama spent countless hours giving speeches, joint session addresses, interviews and attending Town Hall meetings “selling” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act).

No, what is most striking about Obama’s formulation is this: The president of the United States is arguing that “telling a story to the American people” is just as important as the actual policies he’s implementing. (Peggy Noonan provides her thoughts about a similar Obama formulation here:

With all due respect, what on earth is the president talking about?

The thing that determines whether or not we have economic growth and job creation – what determines how quickly recessions end and whether health care costs go down; if Iran gets nuclear weapons or the Afghanistan war is a success – depends on the policies lawmakers implement, not the stories they tell.

I understand the need for politicians to package disparate policies in order to present what George H.W. Bush referred to as “the vision thing.” But for Obama to make a narrative co-equal to a governing agenda is quite remarkable, and no accident.

What Obama’s response reveals, I think, is the degree to which he is a product of the academy, where things like post-modernism and deconstructionism were all the rage during the time Obama was at Columbia, Harvard Law School, and teaching at the University of Chicago. For the unfamiliar, deconstructionism argues that texts have no intrinsic merit or worth; that everything resides in the eye and mind of the reader; and that, as Milton Rosenberg has put it, “objectivity, reason, and meaningful moral purpose are all and always vain illusions.”

What matters are stories and narratives — and who can weave the best tales.

To be clear: I’m not arguing that Barack Obama is Jacques Derrida. But there’s no question there was an intellectual milieu in which the president grew up. He is a product of the academy and thoroughly familiar with, and undoubtedly heavily influenced by, its intellectual trends and currents. And that explains, I think, the enormous importance Obama places on “telling a story to the American people.”

What Obama should have learned by now – but apparently has not – is that the American people are not like chained prisoners watching shadows on the wall. They are able to distinguish illusions from reality, to prioritize between stories and policies, to ascend and see the things in the upper world. And they are also quite willing and able to judge their political leaders based on objective outcomes rather than on narratives and word-play.

That is, I suspect, what the president most fears.

 

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