“At the Faulkner household, it’s known as ‘The Hug.’” That makes it sound like a painting or sculpture, but it is in fact a photograph of young Ashley with the president of the United States. George W. Bush is shown full face, hugging a fifteen-year-old girl. The photograph was taken by her father, marketing consultant Lynn Faulkner, on May 6, 2004, at a rally in Lebanon, Ohio, during the presidential election campaign. Sent by e-mail to a few family friends, it began to circulate amongst Bush supporters on the Internet. And within a few days, it had been seen all over the United States. “ ‘People can immediately see in that photo an authenticness,’ Lynn Faulkner said. ‘I think that’s why the image continues to travel.’ ”1
A few weeks later, the conservative lobby Progress for America Voter Fund suggested to Lynn Faulkner that Ashley’s story should be turned into a campaign advertisement. He agreed. “The Hug” became Ashley’s Story, a commercial that was shown 30,000 times on local TV channels in the nine swing states where the outcome of the clash between Republicans and Democrats was uncertain. According to observers on both sides, it changed the course of the presidential election of November 2004.2 “Karl Rove and his team of Republican operatives are accepting congratulations for engineering President Bush’s re-election campaign. But there’s another less likely Republican who deserves a lot of credit for the president’s win: Lebanon, Ohio resident Lynn Faulkner.”3
“My wife Wendy was murdered by terrorists on 11 September…” That is how Ashley’s Story begins. The man who is speaking to the camera is standing in front of the family bookcase in his shirt sleeves. His name appears at the bottom of the screen: Lynn Faulkner, Mason, Ohio. The camera zooms in on a photo of his wife and her two daughters, who are about ten. The voiceover goes on: “After her mother’s death, the Faulkners’ daughter Ashley had closed up emotionally.” On the screen, a photo shows Ashley sprawled in a hammock and reading a classic novel with a portrait of a woman in Victorian dress on the cover. The voiceover goes on: “But when President George W. Bush came to Lebanon, Ashley went to see him, just as she did with her mother four years earlier.”
The music moves from a minor to a major key and speeds up as we see images of Bush shaking hands with people in the crowd. Linda Prince, a friend of the Faulkners who attended the rally with Ashley describes what happened next: “As the President approached, I said to him: ‘Mr. President, this young lady lost her mother in the World Trade Center.’ ” “He turned towards me,” says Ashley Faulkner, who was filmed a few weeks later in the garden of the family home. “He said to me: ‘I know it’s hard. Are you OK?’ ”
Linda Prince: “Our president took Ashley in his arms and hugged her to his chest [the camera shows the photo of Ashley in Bush’s arms]. And it was at that moment, we saw Ashley’s eyes fill up with tears.”
Ashley Faulkner: “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe, that I’m OK.”
Lynn Faulkner, the girl’s father, then concludes: “What I saw was [shot of newspaper headline: “Bush comforts daughter of 9/11 victim”] what I wanted to see in the heart [shot of Bush congratulating a firefighter at Ground Zero] and soul of the man who sits in the highest elected office in the land.” The commercial ends with a shot of George W. Bush in profile, eyes downcast and in a contemplative mood. The music ends on a major chord.4
It was the most expensive commercial of the 2004 presidential election campaign, costing $6.5 million according to a study from the Center for Public Integrity. Television broadcasts during the last three weeks of the campaign were backed up by a communications exercise that involved sending out over 2.3 million brochures, the sending millions of e-mails, and an automated telephone campaign.5 Its success was without precedent in the history of American political campaigns, and Ashley’s Story has become an object of study for communications researchers.
According to the University of Maryland’s Susan Allen: “The ad has earned praise for its effectiveness from analysts on both sides.”6
“It was a very effective piece of political advertising because it was a personal story,” says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron in Ohio, a state that, not surprisingly, was inundated with campaign spots this year. “It took a grand, ugly thing [terrorism] and put it in a context people can understand. That picture of Bush with the little girl is very effective television … The ad breaks one taboo in using a motherless child to deliver one part of the ad’s message, but few charges of exploitation have been leveled against the ad, in part because Ashley’s father delivers the message in a low-key, non-combative tone.”7
According to Salon web magazine, Ashley’s Story had an impact because it was “memorable, motivating, and feel-good.”8 The commercial only lasts for 60 seconds, but it is indeed remarkably effective: a rapid montage of a sequence of brief shots showing the various eye-witnesses reinforces the coherence and credibility of the story. Although he is the central figure in the narrative, the president does not say anything. He is neither expressing an idea nor outlining a program. He is all serenity and kindness. Although he has helped to work a sort of miracle, he is present only through the eye-witness accounts that describe his actions and words, as in the life of a saint in the Gospel story.
Young Ashley first appears in photographs (first with her mother and sister, and then reading in the hammock), but she is the one who delivers the key message: “He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe, that I’m OK.” Linda Prince, the family friend who stands in for the girls’ absent mother and who introduced Ashley to the president, plays an essential part. She confirms that the girl underwent an emotional transformation: a “psychological recovery,” with Bush as its medium: “And it was at that moment that we saw Ashley’s eyes fill up with tears.”
The president’s intervention brings her out of her emotional “closure.” His compassion has a healing effect: “When [Bush] wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest, she really did show more feeling and more pain than she had in the past three years. She said it was the first time she had felt safe since her mother’s murder.”9 Ashley’s father, who took the photo, plays the role of the eye-witness. He opens and closes the story, but without completely destroying its mystery. He describes his meeting with Bush as though he were describing a supernatural phenomenon: “What I saw was what I want to see in the heart and soul of the man who sits in the highest elected office in our country.”
The photo-memory of the mother with her two daughters, the images of Bush mingling with crowd, the reproduction of the local paper that reported the event during which the president comforted the daughter of a 9/11 victim, and the photo of Bush congratulating a New York firefighter are all exhibits that confirm the accuracy of what is being reported and confirm the ad’s central message, delivered by the girl.
Sociologist Francesca Polletta emphasizes the great importance of the word safe—“Are you all right?” It means free from danger or injury, but it also has a therapeutic meaning: “It represented the 9/11 attack as something that was experienced by those in America’s heartland, and represented its victims as Bush supporters … The spot also turned the terrorist threat into something that had taken place in the past. Making Ashley safe meant easing the emotional after-effects of a terrorist attack, not protecting her from future attack.”10
The Faulkners were quite right: the photo of Ashley in Bush’s arms does look like a holy picture or an icon of compassionate conservatism. Ashley’s story borrows its narrative codes from a biblical parable: it is the story of an important event, namely a memorable encounter followed by a miracle cure. At the end of the commercial we see Bush congratulating a New York firefighter; the photo has been subtly retouched to present the figure of the president in a stance and a light that evoke pictures of Christ and the saints.
“They Produce a Narrative, We Produce a Litany”
Ashley’s Story is a masterpiece of manipulation. It can be seen as storytelling’s sanctioning—and revision—of a job description that emerged 20 years earlier in the world of American politics: “communications adviser” or “spin doctor.” The term “spin,” which was coined by Ronald Reagan’s adviser in 1984, was first used during a televised debate with Democratic candidate Walter Mondale. Although Mondale far outclassed the outgoing president, Reagan’s aide Lee Atwater said after the debate: “Now we’re going to go out here and spin this afterward.”11 “Afterward” was a reference to the “debate about the debate,” which is now as important a part of a presidential campaign as the debate itself. Thanks to an intense “spinning” campaign, it allowed Reagan to win the debate.
Lee Atwater, who died in 1991, was the perfect example of the shadowy advisers journalist Jack Rosenthal dubbed “spin doctors” in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on October 21, 1984, the day of the debate itself. The term was inspired by the “spin” that is applied to a tennis or billiard ball, or the way a top spins. Spin doctors can therefore be defined as “influencing” agents who supply arguments, images, and stage directions that have the desired effect on public opinion.
After the Democrats lost the 2004 election, James Carville, one of the spin doctors who had engineered Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992, stated: “I think we could elect someone from the Hollywood Hills if they had a narrative to tell people about what the country is and where they see it.” Republican pollster Stanley Greenberg told reporters: “A narrative is the key to everything.” A few days later on Meet the Press, Carville was even more explicit: “They produce a narrative, we produce a litany. They say, ‘I’m going to protect you from the terrorists in Tehran and the homos in Hollywood.’ We say, ‘We’re for clean air, better schools, more health care.’ ”12
Is saying “I’ll protect you from the terrorists in Tehran and the homos in Hollywood” really a narrative? Probably not, if we are thinking in terms of purely literary categories. But using the phrase in the context of an election did indeed have the effect of plunging Republican voters into a narrative world. According to Francesca Polletta, what Carville was actually saying was: “The Republicans gave voters villains and heroes; new characters in age-old dramas of threat, vengeance, and salvation. The Democrats ticked off a dry list of familiar issues.”13 According to Carville, the Republicans had succeeded in presenting the election issue in the form of a plot that could easily be understood and that could mobilize simple emotions like fear, loneliness, and the need for protection. They invited on to the political stage sympathetic heroes (middle-class Americans) and villains (the terrorists in Tehran and the homos in Hollywood) and created a narrative tension between them. The election of the Republican candidate would, it was implied, resolve that tension.
Paul Begala, another Democrat spin doctor, described how John Kerry consulted him in 2004, at a time when he was doing badly in the polls. Knowing that Kerry was a former prosecutor, he advised him to defend his candidacy before voters as though he were pleading a case in court. According to his notes, Kerry came up with a list of six key themes: jobs, taxes, fiscal policy, health care, energy, and education. “This was a list, not a ‘case,’ ” Begala fretted.14 “If you are not communicating in stories,” write Carville and Begala, “you’re not communicating. That’s why, from the Greek myths to the griots of Africa, the history of humanity has been told in stories.” In their view, the art of telling stories is one of the 12 secrets that make it possible to win an election: “Facts tell, but stories sell.”15
The celebrated marketing guru Seth Godin’s analysis is the same: “Why did John Kerry lose against an incumbent with near-record-low approval ratings after spending more than $100,000,000 on his campaign? Simple. He didn’t tell a coherent story, a lie worth remembering, a story worth sharing … Like him or not, George W. Bush did an extraordinary job of living the story of the strong, certain, infallible leader. John Kerry tried to win on intellect and he lost because too few voters chose to believe a story they perceived as inconsistent and unclear.”16
Interviewed by Newsweek in October 2006, mid-way through the midterm elections, James Carville again contrasted the Republican narrative with the Democrat litany. Asked why Democrats were having so much trouble getting elected, he replied:
Because the Democrats have a predictable litany. “I believe in a woman’s right to choose. I believe a good school system is essential to what we are. I stand for the minimum wage.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s like when I was an altar boy: “I believe in the virgin birth, I believe in this and that.” The [real] narrative (of the Christian litany) is “We were a bunch of sinners and Jesus came and died and bled and saved us all.” As John Kerry was going through this predictable litany during the [2004 presidential] election, Bush was out there saying, “I was a drunk and I was saved by the power of Jesus Christ and I was saved by 9/11, and I will protect you from the terrorists in Tehran and the homos in Hollywood.” It’s a narrative voters can relate to. The Democrats’ first inclination is to expand the litany, rather than developing a focused narrative. Most elements of the litany I’m fine with. But we’re not going to win by reciting it.17
A few weeks before the 2004 election, William Safire, an old hand at political communications, mocked the spin doctors’ explanations in an article entitled “The Way We Live Now.” Mocking their analysis (“gotta have a plot—no plot, no narrative coherence”), he cites one of their number as saying that if they had won, the “Democrats would have been congratulating the Kerry campaign for having constructed a coherent narrative.” “After an event, there are people who want to control the perception of that event, and the way they do that is by intervening with a narrative.” The Democrat’s post-election “narrative” was that “Kerry had no coherent narrative.”
William Safire cites the analysis of Peter Brooks, an academic specialist in the theory of narrative: “The use of the word narrative is completely out of hand! … While I think the term has been trivialized through overuse, I believe the over-use corresponds to a recognition that narrative is one of the principal ways in which we organize our experience of the world—a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long neglected by psychologists and philosophers.”18
Prosecutor Starr, who wrote the report on the Monica Lewinsky affair, presented his major findings in a section titled “Narrative,” “in a play for public acceptance” of his interpretation. Safire cites Peter Brooks as saying: “Had Starr chosen a more cubist approach, readers would of course have constructed their own narratives … The claim that there was one narrative was a pre-emptive strike against dissenting opinions. (In the same way, Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 commission said of its 2004 report: ‘We finally cut all adjectives and ended up with a sparse narrative style.’)”19 The suggestion that there was only one possible narrative presumably improved the book’s sales.
William Safire was mocking those he called the “politerati” (literate politicians) and the “narratological” vulgate the spin doctors seized upon in the American success of the structural analysis of narrative inaugurated by Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Algirdas Greimas, and a few others. It paved the way for the new discipline Tzvetan Todorov called “narratology,” or the science of narrative. Barthes’ idea that narrative is one of the great cognitive categories that allows us to understand and organize the world was developed in Paris within a small circle of researchers at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. It had enjoyed such success in the United States that it was becoming something that any fool studying political science was familiar with. This was probably the first time that the name of Roland Barthes had appeared in a New York Times op-ed piece on an American election, but it demonstrates the extent to which political science had adopted the language and concepts of the literary criticism of the 1960s.
Yet when President Bush’s popularity rating collapsed after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the same Safire rallied in despair to the narrative approach he had mocked in his December 2004 article. “I think now we’re in the grip of a narrative. And the narrative is ‘The president and this presidency is finished.’ And his polls are way down. He didn’t do Katrina right, the war is not over. And everything he does is shaded by this narrative.” Safire had not, however, lost hope: the situation might still turn in favor of Bush, not because of some resolute action on behalf of New Orleans and its population, but simply because the media coverage required it to do so: “The wonderful thing about American attention and media coverage, is the narrative has to change. It can’t stay the same, or else it’s not newsworthy. And so the story will be the comeback.”20
Why does storytelling have such a grip on political discourse in the United States? Why is telling edifying stories seen as a new paradigm for the political sciences, and why has it replaced the notions of images and rhetoric to such an extent that it dominates not only election campaigns, but also the exercise of executive power and the management of crisis situations? American political scientists usually invoke three kinds of reasons: the first is the national fiber of Americans; the second refers to the talent of individuals and especially of Ronald Reagan, who was proclaimed by Carville and Begala to be “the greatest storyteller to grace the White House in the last fifty years.”21 The third evokes the “spirit of the times,” which is described as “postmodern,” and in which, now that the grand narratives have collapsed, the emphasis is on anecdotes and the appeal of short stories illustrating the ferocious competition between values and legitimation-vectors.
As we have seen, Evan Cornog, who teaches journalism at Columbia and was cited in the introduction, opts for the first explanation: “The essence of American presidential leadership, and the secret of presidential success, is storytelling.”22 According to Cornog, all American presidential candidates share a common history of American myths and heroes, and must inscribe themselves in that narrative lineage by using their family background and personal history and comparing it with that of other candidates during presidential campaigns: “It is the battle of stories, not the debate on issues, that determines how Americans respond to a presidential contender.”23 For Cornog, “These crafted narratives are the principal medium of exchange of our public life, the currency of American politics.”24 Not one to be afraid of grandiloquence, he boldly concludes that: “The future of the nation, and of the world, depends upon the abilities of American citizens to choose the right stories.”25
It is undeniable that the lives and political histories of American presidents were turned into “stories” and even heroicized long ago. That may, however, have more to do with Hollywood’s role in American society than with some presidential “essence.” And, even if it were a matter of a presidential “essence,” the fact remains that the stories that grew up around the figure of, for example, Lincoln,26 have nothing to do with the use the story spinners have made of them since the 1990s. Some tell their stories a posteriori, in order to legitimize presidential actions or to turn them into legend, while others manufacture stories in order to win and then exercise power, and control their viral distribution in order to create the horizon of expectations that will give them consistency, and manipulate the socio-technical conditions for their distribution and interpretation. In a word, they establish the concrete preconditions for their dissemination throughout society.27
There is also a danger that any attempt to explain the triumph of political storytelling in terms of the American “national character” will obscure the historical and transdisciplinary nature of the narrative turn; from the mid 1990s onwards, it affected domains as diverse as management, marketing, politics, and the defense of the nation. The “genetic” explanation in fact generates clichés about the American “political spectacle” and suggests that political storytelling has simply replaced the old marketing, with its parades of majorettes, ticker tape, and giant neon signs.
Historians of the presidency such as Jeffrey K. Tulis, in contrast, point out that, received wisdom notwithstanding, the founding fathers were suspicious of clever speeches because they “manifest demagogy, impede deliberation, and subvert the routine of republican government.” The founding fathers feared the dangers of what we now call the democracy of public opinion or direct democracy; they wanted to ensure that political decisions would not be swayed by shifts in public opinion. Deliberative government, indirect elections, the principle of the separation of powers, and the independence of the executive were all designed to ward off the threat of manipulation. “The now commonplace practice of direct public appeals was shunned during the nineteenth century because it went against existing interpretations of the constitutional order.”28
The usual reason for rejecting the first hypothesis—that storytelling is a permanent feature of American presidencies or the essence of presidential power—is the alternative hypothesis that Ronald Reagan introduced a new governance, a sort of “narratocracy” or narrative presidency. “Our political leaders’ love of stories may no doubt have less to do with Barthes and his followers than with Ronald Reagan, who, I believe, was the first US president to govern largely by anecdote.”29 There are serious arguments to support this thesis, and it is true that the presidents who followed Reagan into the White House used his method of communication, imitating and sometimes even plagiarizing his speeches.
The journalist Serge Halimi looks, for example, at two State of the Union Addresses.30 The first is by Ronald Reagan (February 6, 1985) and the second by George W. Bush (January 23, 2007). There are a lot of similarities between them—the occasion, the authority that legitimates them, and the discursive style which makes them so similar that one might think they were written by the same person.
Ronald Reagan:
Two hundred years of American history should have taught us that nothing is impossible. Ten years ago a young girl left Vietnam with her family, part of the exodus that followed the fall of Saigon. They came to the United States with no possessions and not knowing a word of English. Ten years ago—the young girl studied hard, learned English, and finished high school in the top of her class. And this May, May 22nd to be exact, is a big date on her calendar. Just ten years from the time she left Vietnam, she will graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point. I thought you might like to meet an American hero named Jean Nguyen. [The “American” hero stands and receives an ovation; Reagan tells another edifying story, and then reveals the moral of both stories.] Your lives tell us that the oldest American saying is new again. Anything is possible in America if we have the faith, the will, and the heart. History is asking us once again to be a force for good in the world.31
Twenty-two years later, George W. Bush entered the White House:
The greatest strength we have is the heroic kindness, courage, and self-sacrifice of the American people. You see this spirit often if you know where to look—and tonight we need only look above to the gallery. Dikembe Mutombo grew up in Africa, amid great poverty and disease. He came to Georgetown University to study medicine—but Coach John Thompson got a look at Dikembe and had a different idea. Dikembe became a star in the NBA, and a citizen of the United States, but he never forgot about the land of his birth—or the duty to share his blessings with others. He has built a brand new hospital in his hometown. A friend has said of this good-hearted man, “Mutumbo believes that God has given him this opportunity to do great things.” And we are proud to call this son of the Congo our fellow American.32
Bush goes on to tell other stories, like that of Julie Aigner-Clark who, after the birth of her daughter, founded the Baby Einstein Company, which makes educational videos for young children. In just five years, her company grew into a $200 million business, and she then went on to produce child-safety videos. “We are pleased to welcome this talented business entrepreneur and generous social entrepreneur—Julie Aigner-Clark.” Then there was the story of Wesley Autrey, who was waiting at a Harlem subway station with his two little girls when he saw a man fall into the path of a train. “Wesley jumped on to the tracks … pulled the man into a space between the rails … and held him as the train passed right over their heads … There is something wonderful about a country that produces a brave and humble man like Wesley Autrey.” And finally, he told the story of Tommy Rieman, a young man from Independence, Ohio, who enlisted in the US Army. He was wounded in Iraq and awarded the Silver Star: “And like so many other Americans who have volunteered to defend us, he has earned the respect and gratitude of our whole country.”
The moral of the stories is: “In such courage and compassion, ladies and gentlemen, we see the spirit and character of America—and these qualities are not in short supply.”
The Great Communicator Reagan, and his Disciples Clinton and Sarkozy
As just noted, according to James Carville and Paul Begala, Ronald Reagan was “the greatest storyteller to have graced the White House in the last fifty years,” even though many of his stories were simply false. In order to fan America’s resentment against welfare, he told the story of “the welfare queen who’d purchased a Cadillac with government largesse.” The facts were, of course, all wrong, but the point was clear: “hardworking Americans were the heroes, the welfare queen was the villain and the poor, beleaguered middle-class taxpayers were the victims. Reagan could simply have read a laundry list of statistics, but he knew a story would have an immeasurably greater impact.”33 “Reagan understood,” writes Peter Brooks, “that the concrete particularity of storytelling will always be more vivid than compilations of facts.”34 Under Reagan’s presidency, official discourse made more use of colorful stories that spoke to Americans’ hearts rather than their intellect, and to their emotions rather than their opinions. Anecdotes replaced statistics in official speeches. And the president’s inventions replaced reality. He sometimes evoked episodes from old war movies as though they were part of the real history of the United States.
And his successors remembered the lesson. A few weeks after his election, Bill Clinton surprised everyone by appointing David R. Gergen as his director of communications. Gergen had held that position under Reagan. On the day he took up his appointment, Gergen states: “They simply understood what Reagan had understood.”35 Twelve years later, Clinton confirmed this in his own way: “My Uncle Buddy taught me that everyone has a story.”36 He ends his autobiography with the words: “As I said, I think it’s a good story.”37
Throughout the 1,000 pages of a book that is full of anecdotes of uneven interest, Clinton constantly puts the history of America on the same plane as the story of a kid from Hope, Arkansas, who was born under a good star, and carefully considered decisions (which led to wars) on the same plane as ill-considered decisions that left stains on the dress of a White House intern. His marathon book is littered with all sorts of incidents, some fortuitous and some historic, family and international incidents, chance and planned encounters, and portraits of the celebrities of the political world as well as unknowns. It is like reading an ad man’s tribute to the American heartlands. History is stripped of any grandeur or epic profundity. The trouble with Clinton, who was described by an American comedian as “a tax and spin president,” was that “he spins when the truth would serve him better. But once spin control becomes common it soon becomes a habit and then a way of life.”38
In his memoirs, Clinton defends a novel conception of politics. In his view, politics no longer means solving economic, political, or military problems; it must give people the opportunity to improve their stories. Presidential power is no longer the power to take decisions or to organize things; the president is a screenwriter and director, and the main actor in a political sequence that lasts for the duration of his mandate, rather like TV series that grip everyone, such as 24 or The West Wing.
The White House, with the Oval Office at its heart, is viewed as a stage or the set where a film about the presidency is being shot. The “story” of a presidential candidate is a fiction that organizes a tangle of contradictory ideas, impressions, and actions, and makes them instantly comprehensible. The point is not to use a story to shed light on a lived experience, but simply to dress up silhouettes and bring them to life, to turn the new president and his entourage into characters in a “coherent story,” and to popularize the saga of his doings. As Seth Godin puts it: “From the clothes he wears, to his spouse and his appointees, he’s telling a story.”39
Executive power becomes the power to “execute,” to direct (in the cinematographic sense) a presidential screenplay that is viewed as a sequence of decisions that is constantly being edited. The highly symbolic activity of power boils down to this: the coordination of flows of information, centralized control over information policy, the power to influence the media, either directly or indirectly, and to mobilize support for the president’s initiatives. That was precisely the program implemented by Nicolas Sarkozy, who was elected president of France in May 2007, during his election campaign and the first months of his presidency.
The dangers inherent in this use of power are obvious; as John Anthony Maltese put it in 1994: “A less deliberative process in government and the citizenry inundated with the symbolic spectacle of politics but ill- equipped to judge its leaders or the merits of their policies.”40 And according to Richard Rose in his book The Postmodern President: “A key to presidential power, then, is the ability to harness (or manufacture) opinion. The result is a sort of unending political campaign.”41
In his inaugural lecture to the Collège de France on December 2, 1970, Michel Foucault told an anecdote about the Shogun of Japan:
The Shogun had heard tell that the Europeans’ superiority in matters of navigation, commerce, politics, and military skill was due to their knowledge of mathematics. As he had been told of an English sailor who possessed the secret of these miraculous discourses, he summoned him to his palace and kept him there. Alone with him, he took lessons. He learned mathematics. He retained power, and lived to a great age. It was not until the nineteenth century that there were Japanese mathematicians.
This anecdote, so beautiful that one trembles at the thought that it might be true … gathers into a single figure all the constraints of discourse: those which limit its powers, those which master its aleatory appearances, those which carry out the selections among speaking subjects.42
Is such an illusion still possible, now that the explosion of sources, forms, and producers of utterances has given rise to the proliferation of enigmatic signs that Jean-François Lyotard defines as “the postmodern condition”? How can we control the explosion of discursive practices on the Internet? How can we communicate in this chaos of fragmented knowledge without the help of some shared legitimizing figure? How can we ascribe a meaning to social and workplace experiences that are characterized by their precariousness and lack of any long-term future? How are we to establish sets, or a logical or chronological sequence? How are we to describe the conflicts of interest, the ideological or religious collisions, or the culture wars? These are some of the questions that have to be dealt with by public speech and all those who are responsible for its expression, be they journalists or politicians, advisers to the prince, specialists in political marketing or speech writers. This is why storytelling has become the “magic” formula that can inspire trust and even belief in voter-subjects.
Today’s Shogun, or his heirs—the president of the Republic, the head of the general staff, or the spin doctors—would not burden themselves with a sailor-mathematician. They would set their heart on having a creole conteur, an African griot or, failing that, a storyteller. The postmodern paradigm is usually invoked to explain the downward spiral of political discourse. It could even be described as the spontaneous ideology of the new galaxy that the Internet has created. Like some new and expanding discursive universe, it is replacing the Gutenberg galaxy, and its unknown constellations are populated by millions of nameless stars, author-satellites, and black holes.
The chaos of fragmented knowledge facilitated the “narrative turn” in political communications and the advent of a new era. This is democracy’s performative age, and its figureheads are no longer the advisers to the prince or the Talleyrands and the Mazarins, but the prophets, the gurus, and the parties; spin doctors, and their ability to tell stories and to mystify, has made them drunk. Storytelling is their modus operandi because it is the only thing that can get a hold on these dispersed interests and discourses. Never before has there been such a trend to view political life as a deceptive narrative designed to replace deliberative assemblies of citizens with a captive audience, while mimicking a sociability in which TV series, authors, and actors are the only things they are all familiar with. Its function is to create a virtual and fictional community. The trend is so astonishingly fluid, so much part of the spirit of the times, and so much part of the air we breathe and the general climate of the age, that it goes unnoticed. And that of course is the key to its irresistible success.
Watergate and the Coming of the Spin Doctors
If we wish to understand the “narrative turn” taken by American politics during the Reagan years, we have to go back to Nixon’s presidency and the trauma of Watergate. It is impossible to understand Watergate without making an analysis of the concrete conditions (which are at once ideological and technical, political and institutional) that, in the 40 years between Nixon and George W. Bush, led to the general “fictionalization” of American political discourse (and its equivalents elsewhere in the West).
As soon as he took office, Richard Nixon declared that the press was the “enemy.” Embittered by the treatment reserved for John F. Kennedy, the former political rival who became a legend when he was assassinated, and by the media dominance of liberals opposed to the war in Vietnam, Nixon urged his advisers (who already included Safire and Gergen) to bypass the Washington press. The beginnings of mass television worked to the advantage of his strategy of appealing directly to the American people and going over the heads of journalists. Bypassing the press and making direct appeals to the silent majority: both these characteristic features of the conservative revolution had already been clearly defined by Nixon.
Nixon’s two mandates were the theater of a real war between the president and the media. Everyone remembers the final battle over Watergate, which ended with the president’s resignation and the recognition that the press was the “fourth power”; but, while Watergate did usher in a new era, it was not that of journalistic counter-power. On the contrary, it ushered in the age of the hegemonic power of the spin doctors. That is obvious to anyone who reads John Anthony Maltese’s Spin Control (1994), which reconstructs the history of the White House’s “Office of Communications.”
It was Nixon who established the Office of Communications. His reasons for doing so were simple, as the former president explains clearly in his memoirs: “[Modern presidents] must try to master the art of manipulating the media, not only in order to win in politics, but in order to further the programs and causes they believe in; at the same time, they must avoid at all cost the charge of trying to manipulate the media. Concern for image must rank with concern for substance.”43
The growing number of media, the rise in the number of accredited journalists and the internationalization of media coverage eroded the intimate relationship between the government and the press that made it possible to restrict flows of information to only a few channels. Television gave direct access to the public and the development of satellites extended its range to the whole country and even internationally. Political power was increasingly subject to public opinion, and addressed it directly. Communication came to mean influencing public opinion rather than just feeding news to the press. Nixon called this “going public.”
Looking back at his experience as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff, Dick Cheney (who was to become George W. Bush’s vice-president) said precisely that, when in 1992 he admitted to John Anthony Maltese: “To have an effective presidency, the White House must control the agenda … The most powerful tool you have is the ability to use the symbolic aspects of presidency to promote your goals and objectives. You don’t let the press set the agenda … They like to decide what’s important and what isn’t important. But if you let them do that, they’re going to trash your presidency.”44 In those few lines, Dick Cheney defined the role of the White House Office of Communications. Its mission and organization remained the same from Nixon to Bush, despite all the handovers of power and political ups and downs.
The continuity is easily explained. The Office was staffed by a small group of men who took over from one another as power changed hands and who shaped a doctrine of political communications: Dick Cheney, James A. Baker III, David R. Gergen, Michael Deaver, Patrick Buchanan, William Safire, and a few others. Frank Ursomarso, who became Reagan’s director of communications in February 1981, had already worked in the White House during the Nixon and Ford presidencies. David R. Gergen, who had been director of communications under Nixon, ran the office for Gerald Ford and then Ronald Reagan before being reappointed, as we have already seen, by Bill Clinton in 1992. Most of these men had lived through the trauma of Watergate, which put an end to the career of Richard Nixon. As Gergen explained to columnist Mark Hersgaard: “All of us came out of the Watergate years. I know a lot of people who went to jail, people whose careers crashed, people who were at the top who went to the bottom.”45
After the chain of disasters of Nixon’s forced resignation followed by the electoral defeats of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter—with the media playing a destabilizing role—Ronald Reagan entered the White House with a stubborn determination to control the press. His program was clear, and it called for a conservative revolution that would base its values upon public opinion. The appeal to the concept of “the silent majority” erupted into American political life. The technological revolution would allow it to penetrate the whole of the United States in real time.
The White House Office of Communications was given the responsibility of handling the presidency’s strategic agenda. Its goal was to ensure that every member of the presidential team adhered to it and promoted it in public opinion by using a form of mass marketing. Every day a “line of the day” (in the 1990s, this became the “story of the day”) was drawn up and distributed to the various branches of the executive and the accredited press, and also through televised messages addressed directly to the public. Focus groups and polls were used to elaborate presidential messages and sound-bites were inserted into the president’s speeches in order to get them across, while his public appearances were stage-managed in order to reinforce their visual impact and block other messages.
The former Hollywood actor knew how to “follow the script,” as Maltese puts is, but he was also helped by a team of communicators who knew how to “set the stage.” It was headed by James Baker III, who had worked on Gerald Ford’s campaign in 1976, and David R. Gergen, who had been Ford’s director of communications: “We think we have the best communicator president since John Kennedy. We want to use him properly.” It was Gergen who introduced the “line of the day.” Developed during the Nixon presidency, the practice consisted in defining a daily presidential screenplay that was “sold” to the press. If journalists tried to depart from it, they were promptly pulled back into line. As President Reagan said one day: “If I answer that question now, none of you will say anything about what you’re here for today. I’m not going to give you a different line.”46
Ronald Reagan’s talents are not in dispute, but they would have been useless without the Office of Communications’ centralized control of the news or what the New York Times journalist Steven Weisman called “the art of control access”: “The Reagan White House controlled the agenda, kept up the offensive, deflected criticism from the president, made sure the administration spoke with one voice, and molded its communications strategy around its legislative strategy.” Under Reagan, the Office of Communications “helped to create a counter-reality through his visuals. The idea was to divert people’s attention away from the substantive issues by creating a world of myths and symbols that made people feel good about themselves and their country.”47
Thanks to Reagan and Clinton, political communications acquired new masters and adopted a new register—and this tendency would become even more pronounced with Bush and after 9/11. The goal was no longer simply to keep the public well-informed about the executive’s decisions by trying to control the political agenda, but to create a virtual new world, an enchanted kingdom populated by heroes and anti-heroes that the citizen-actor was invited to enter. The point was now not so much to communicate as to create a story and force it on to the political agenda: “Spinning a story involves twisting it to one’s advantage, using surrogates, press releases, radio actualities, and other friendly sources to deliver the line from an angle that puts the story in the best possible light. Successful spin often involved getting the media to ‘play along’ by convincing them—through briefings, backgrounders, or other methods of persuasion—that a particular spin to a story is the correct one.”48
This brought about the transition from the era of the spin doctors of the 1980s to that of the “story spinners.” The neologism was coined by Evan Cornog: “[Democrat adviser] George Stephanopoulos and [Republican adviser] Karl Rove [are] professional story-spinners [who] have helped presidential candidates fashion their stories and identified the best methods of spreading their message.”49 These story spinners now have the subtle task of mobilizing public opinion and turning events into stories. As Cornog explains:
A presidential campaign is a great festival of narration, with the press serving simultaneously as actor, chorus, and audience. The press interprets stories, has stories reinterpreted for it by political spin doctors, and responds (sometimes) to the public’s appetite for new narratives. Campaigns are a high-velocity duel of story versus story that is stretched out over months. New stories must constantly be developed, as old ones are either overturned or lose the public’s interest. The successful candidate is the one whose stories connect with the largest number of voters.50
While the exercise of presidential power tends to be identified with a sort of uninterrupted election campaign, the criteria for good political communications are increasingly defined by a performative rhetoric (discourses that create facts or situations) whose goal is no longer to transmit information or to explain decisions but to influence the moods and emotions of voters, who are increasingly seen as an audience watching a play. And, in order to do so, it no longer uses arguments or programs, but characters and stories. Democracy becomes something to be stage-managed rather than the exercise of politics.
The ability to structure a political vision by telling stories rather than using rational arguments has become the key to winning and exercising power in media-dominated societies that are awash with rumors, fake news, and disinformation. It is no longer pertinence that makes public speech effective but plausibility, or the ability to win support, to seduce and to deceive (like the famous “Work more in order to earn more” slogan used by Nicolas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential campaign). A candidacy’s success no longer depends upon the coherence of an economic program, the pertinence of the solutions that are on offer, or even a lucid vision of what is at stake in geostrategic or ecological terms, but upon the ability to mobilize an audience and retain its loyalty. While the art of the novel consists in a paradoxical enunciation of the truth Aragon defined as “telling true lies,” the spin doctors use storytelling as the art of absolute deception, as what we might call “telling false lies,” or a new form of disinformation.
American constitutional power has, in the words of the historian Jeffrey K. Tulis, become “a kind of government by assembly without a genuine assembly of the people. In this fictive assembly, television speaks to the president in metaphors expressive of the ‘opinion’ of the people, and the president responds to the demand and moods created by the media with rhetoric designed to manipulate popular passions rather than to engage citizens in political debate.”51
It is therefore logical that the election of a new president should look more like the introduction of a fictional character than a political appointment. Once elected, he introduces a certain style, and style has replaced the protocol that once established the order of the ceremonies and introduced the incoming president into a certain institutional order and a hierarchy of precedence and antecedents. The induction of a newly elected president now borrows its metaphors from the order of narrative. Rather than emphasizing the weight of his responsibilities and the burden of power, the talk is of “writing a new page,” of a “meeting between a man and a people,” or of “the dawn of a new era.” A narrative grammar is replacing presidential protocol, and a eulogy of the powers of narrative is replacing the transmission of the “attributes” of power.
As we saw in the introduction, as soon as he entered the White House in January 2001, George W. Bush introduced the members of his government by evoking “stories that really explain what America can and should be about.” Five years later in February 2006, after a lightning visit to Afghanistan, he used the same words twice during a press conference: “We like stories, and expect stories, of young girls going to school in Afghanistan.” The repetition was not a sign of tiredness. It revealed his adviser Karl Rove’s insistence that political life had to be turned into a series of evocative stories and moving tales.
According to Evan Cornog:
September 11 pushed a new master narrative to the foreground and Bush and his team adroitly seized this new story line and made it theirs, just as in 2000 they had managed to construct a winning campaign around his modest life story. The theme of suffering and redemption was central in both instances. In Bush’s personal life, the tale of his struggles with—and victory over—alcohol renders sympathetic a figure who might easily have been perceived as a spoiled rich kid … the real adversity of the 9/11 attacks permitted Bush to recast … the new master narrative, which set forth a Manichean struggle between good and evil.52
The same technique was exploited ad nauseam during the mid-term elections of November 2006, when Bush’s ratings were at an all-time low as the US became bogged down in the war in Iraq that had begun three and a half years earlier. According to Ira Chenus, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove now began to implement “Scheherazade’s strategy.” The principle behind it is simple: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories—stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spell-binding that the king (or in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy … The Scheherazade policy … plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control.”53
During the mid-term elections, Rove was trying to do what he had done so successfully when Bush was re-elected in 2004: distract voters’ attention away from the actual record of the war by conjuring up the great collective myths of the American imaginary:
Karl Rove … is betting that the voters will be mesmerized by John-Wayne-style tales of “real men” fighting evil on the frontier—at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentences that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us to the disaster in Iraq … So Rove constantly invents simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell. He tries to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity against Democratic moral confusion … The Scheherazade strategy is giant scam, built upon the illusion that simple moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on in the world … Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement.54
Forced by Democratic pressure to resign in August 2007, Karl Rove referred to a novel to describe his situation: “I am Moby Dick, and they are hunting me.”55 His words signaled the apotheosis of a political career that had been completely dedicated to “storytelling,” defined as a “politics of illusion” that found its full application in the war which began in Iraq in 2003.