A long time ago, in a galaxy that seems far, far way, we were all (and I mean all) pretty damn sure that Hillary Clinton would be pissing us off with not-progressive-enough cabinet picks right about now.
That was the story, at least. That was the almost universally accepted narrative that was in place from last spring right up through November 8th. Sure, there were the occasional handwringing, “he can’t really — can he?” conversations. But we all knew how this was going to play out.
Then the unthinkable happens. The entrail-sifting will go on for a long time; if we don’t know why or how it happened, we won’t be able to fix what went wrong or reinforce what went right.
There will never be one right answer. I think it’s important to keep in mind that it would only have taken a shift in an incredibly small number of votes to alter the election — we’re not looking at a McGovern-level event here. Countering that, of course, is the reality that 46% of the voting public could even bring themselves to pull the metaphorical lever for an incompetent, lying, narcissist whose platform was built on racism, Islamophobia, fear and hate. (And that that 46% was enough to claim the Presidency.)
So what made this possible?
One school of thought that I think has merit is the simplistic-sounding notion that, despite the conventionally wise narrative frame, his campaign turned out to have a good story, and hers did not. Several commentators have written nuanced and insightful takes on this argument — raising questions about heroes and villains in stories, the role of the press in defining and disseminating each side’s story, who Clinton's story was intended for (and whether those people were reachable or even actually exist in large numbers) and, looking forward, who our story should be aimed at now, and the need to recognize the difference between stories that are popular and stories that are right. All are worth a read. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
In its most basic form, it comes down to this: It wasn’t a clash between stories so much as a faceoff between a storyteller and a laundry list.
--
For at least the past half-century, national political campaigns have been focused on branding — on creating a story that resonates with enough of the electorate to put a candidate over the top. A story that could be boiled down to an essential phrase or sentence, whether an official campaign theme or an internal guidepost around which all messaging was aligned. Law and Order. It’s Morning In America. It’s the economy, stupid.
This year we got Make America Great Again — the slogan that launched thousands of grandpa caps and at least as many erudite parsings of its meaning and intent.
It was easy to scorn. But it turned out to be an incredibly powerful and obviously effective rallying cry and core brand statement. The fact that it eluded concrete meaning was a feature, not a bug; widely divergent subsets of the voting population could read into it pretty much whatever they wanted. In their minds, they knew what he stood for. The cruel irony being that, by force of will or kismet or gross media negligence, this inveterate liar and serial self-contradictor — this man who stands for nothing beside the importance of being proven right and humiliating those who point out his absence of clothes — was lauded as a straight shooter who told it like it was.
--
In this scenario, what really stings isn’t just that our comforting big-picture framing was wrong; it’s the possibility that an absence of a clear, compelling story from and about the Clinton campaign is what doomed us to President-Elect Small Hands.
More on that next time.