{"id":4746,"date":"2010-01-27T11:04:52","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T16:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4746"},"modified":"2010-01-27T11:04:52","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T16:04:52","slug":"story-teller-in-chief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4746","title":{"rendered":"Story-Teller-In-Chief"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker<\/em>‘s Junot D\u00edaz explains the role of the president<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation\u2014but none of these things will matter a wit if the President cannot couch his vision, his policies, his courage, his will, his plan in the idiom of story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I entirely agree with this – and have made similar arguments myself over the months. Politics is primarily about story – and I feel that Obama has focused on policy accomplishments over politics for this past year, thus allowing himself to lose control of the narrative. In a sense, this seems deliberate – with the lead up to the midterms coming with a pivot back towards politics, where Obama would be more concerned about pushing forward the right issues rather than getting some accomplishments done.<\/p>\n

But one thing I struggle a bit with – and wonder how D\u00edaz would approach it – is to more specifically define and describe these stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker‘s Junot D\u00edaz explains the role of the president: A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation\u2014but none of these things will matter a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[143,47,27,4,458],"tags":[2552,439],"class_list":["post-4746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-criticism","category-domestic-issues","category-politics","category-the-opinionsphere","tag-junot-diaz","tag-the-new-yorker"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-1ey","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4747,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4746\/revisions\/4747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}