Once upon a time, part four.

So, what can we learn from this disaster movie? (The one I laid out for you in excruciating detail in parts one, two and three.) I’ve gone ahead and overreached a bit to tease out a few important lessons, and one hard truth. (Click-baity!)

1. Tell us a story. The lesson to learn from What Just Happened is not that we shouldn’t shape political and social-issue message into persuasive narratives. Ironically, being members of the reality-based community makes it really, really hard for people on the left to internalize a blindingly obvious reality: As we’ve seen time and time again, facts don’t win elections. We can talk all we want about people voting against their own interests and keep yelling “don’t they get it?!?” at the tv, but it won’t matter. Consumers and voters (same thing, right?) don’t rely on logic to make decisions; we pick and choose facts to confirm choices based in emotion and feeling. We like to think that our worldview is constructed out of things we know to be true, but more often than not the process works in reverse.

And this is not always a bad thing. Sure, we’ve erred way too far in the direction of treating people’s votes as a personal statement rather than a utilitarian exchange (my casting a vote is really not about my feelings), But as much as I didn’t want to have a beer with W., Obama did give me hope, and he painted a very compelling picture of what this country could be. That’s important. Voting may be a functional act, but it’s a means to a more fulfilling end.

Just as important, the things that really divide us in this country are not based in factual disagreements. There are different philosophies about government, different hierarchies of moral values, different belief and nonbelief systems, differing ways to assess the worth of people and places. Again, it’s not as if exposing people to “the facts” would erase these differences; people choose to believe or disbelieve facts based on these differences.

So we need to present people with a compelling story, one that makes sense with their understanding of the world. This doesn’t mean a lowest-common-denominator story designed to offend no one and appeal to everyone. It doesn’t mean sweeping racism/misogyny/etc. under the rug. It means first thinking long and hard about who we really can and want to reach — it’s difficult to tell a good story if you don’t know who you’re talking to — and then finding the intersection between what we believe and what they’re interested in. And then articulating a story that begins in that intersection. And then hitting repeat.

And voilà! We have an effective, compelling storyline. One that’s both based in a simple truth that voters can understand, and reflects directly and positively the values of (whoever gets to make decisions for) the Democratic party.

Oh if only it were really that easy. The real world is much messier. In the absence of a national election to rally around, there will be multiple stories, good and worthy stories, competing for attention. These stories need to be told, and many of them can’t or shouldn’t come from a candidate or party. “Oh, they’re normal people just like us” paved the way for marriage equality. “It’s not fair that my family can’t survive on the minimum wage” is fueling the Fight for $15.

We all have stories to tell. Can they all be grouped under an umbrella super-story that makes it clear what “the left” stands for? Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: They have to be, if we have any hope of counteracting the story that the right has been telling about us for the past 50 years. Which leads to:

2. Keep talking. Stories take a long time to percolate. The best ones, in an electoral sense, articulate and get out in front of already emerging shifts in the political and social landscape. Sometimes this can be credited to fortuitous timing, or a particularly astute campaign manager. But often these seemingly inexorable transformations are the result of years, decades, of careful, deliberate, painstaking work to leverage public opinion and political capital. Republicans and their allies on the right are masters of this. They know how to play the long game.

Follow the lineage back to the Goldwater era and you can see exactly how we got where we are, thanks to billions of dollars spent convincing white middle America (and others) that government is both completely ineffective and incredibly successful at destroying sacred American values; that some “other,” usually of color, is both inherently inferior and amazingly capable of getting, taking or stealing benefits that are rightfully theirs; that coastal elites are effete liberal socialists cowering in the face of crime, guns and “Real America,” and yet still able to exert full control over banks, the media and entertainment. It takes a long time to lay out a story like that, and have it stick.

As part of this concerted, consistent effort, Republicans have learned to use the levers of power and politics amazingly well. See: neutering a governor in a shameless fit of sore-loserhood. Fortunately, they also know how to overplay their hand at times. See: trying to privatize Social Security. (They also have a weird penchant for over-the-top names for things.)

As hard and boring as this work is, Democrats and allies on the left have to do the same, on both the storytelling and machinery sides. The endgame played out with dramatic speed, but marriage equality did not happen overnight. The battles over abortion rights and gun control have gone on for decades, and unfortunately will continue. The infrastructure is growing, but it’s nowhere near an equal counterbalance yet, particularly when it comes to media mouthpieces. (We’ll save the discussion of the left/right split on fake news for another time.)

3. Duck. As we’ve been reminded in the past couple of weeks, it’s difficult to remain appropriately outraged when you can’t even recall all of the things you’re supposed to be outraged about. I described it as whack-a-mole, but it’s really more akin to dodge ball — a punishing, one-sided version where those red rubber balls never stop coming toward your head, because Trump has the automatic ball machine perfectly tuned to his specifications and running like a dream.

So while it’s been nice to see at least a few Congressional Democrats respond early and often, we’ve seen how this tactical approach plays out in the longer term. Being an opposition party gives Democrats the ability — the obligation — to oppose, but there has to be discipline and consistency.

Whether he knows what he’s doing or not, Trump can continue to use his Twitter feed to make progressives (in and out of office) dance to whatever tune he chooses. Unless progressives learn to resist his siren song.

Responding to every outrageous Trumpian act with heartfelt but haphazard outrage is back to whacking moles. With so many to hit, how do you create a compelling story of resistance? (We saw how well that worked for Hillary.) It will take a hell of a lot of willpower, and quick thinking, and strategic brilliance, to step off that particular treadmill. Stay disciplined. Be proactive. Channel the outrage. Control the story.

The good news is, some of the people on Capital Hill are at least aware of the issue.

4. Suspend disbelief. The bad news is, I think we’re just becoming aware of the epic scale of the story we’re now living in.

Which brings us to the bear shitting in the room.

Russian hacking and interference in the presidential election is maybe the biggest, most portentous story of the moment. But honestly I don’t know how to think about it. The peek behind that particular curtain gives me vertigo. Because it really sounds like a made-up story — a dystopian sci-fi vision of the near future. Or a not-quite Manchurian Candidate; more of a Tempertantrurian Candidate, one who blinds us to the truth not by presenting as his own opposite but by filling the sky with so much chaff we can’t see what is true or real anymore.

I’m not sure how to counter that, or even respond to it. Partly it’s my natural rational instinct to disbelieve conspiracy theories. (Damn you, reality-based community!) Partly it’s the implications that follow: How does one superpower respond to a former superpower meddling in the basic foundations of its governing structure? Escalation could happen very quickly if the people making decisions can’t be trusted to keep their heads....

In this particular case, Trump’s instinct to lash out, smear the messenger and deny, deny, deny may not serve him well — while, with any luck, avoiding doing irreparable global damage (if he can manage to keep his wrath aimed at domestic critics).

I don’t think he will be able to brush this under the orange rug and move on. That doesn’t mean he won’t try, by distracting us with some other Twitter-based inanity. (Maybe by picking a fight with...China?) And it doesn’t mean the GOP won’t quickly fall in line and try to banish this episode down the memory hole. (Thanks, Paul!)

Or maybe I still don’t get it. Maybe he’ll be wildly successful — at least as far as his audience of true believers (the only one he cares about) is concerned. Maybe he’s not spinning and spitting lies because he doesn’t know or care about the truth; he’s doing it to reinforce his story.

I’m willing to bet that Trump knows his Electoral College margin was tiny. I’m willing to bet that he knows that there weren’t three million illegitimate voters. I’m willing to bet that he knows Russia was trying to help him. He’s not concerned with facts or evidence; he’s focused on framing the story for his followers. Fact-checking, shmact-checking—that’s something the MSM does and elites care about. Trump is tweeting bald-faced lies to give his followers cover, to give them something they can believe that won’t reduce their faith in him.

And that kind of thing doesn’t stop with an election; it’s now being baked into the operation of government itself. The story of a campaign is becoming the story of our country. And the fact that it pisses off libtards makes it that much sweeter (or for a lot of his base, is actually the point).

Something must be done. Right? We can’t let election-shaking shenanigans imported from overseas be allowed to stand. Right? Have we, finally, really lost all sense of decency?

I don’t believe it’s too late to duck. But many of us have been numbed by the onslaught of norm-smashing and “nothing-like-this-in-our”-histrionics and are a little too dazed at the moment to clearly think things through.  

That leaves me at the hard truth which is really the real starting place, and ultimately the most important lesson.

5. Pay attention. Remember. Never normalize.

It’s not much. But it’s everything. 

Once upon a time, part three.

To pick up where I left off: There were fatal flaws with Hillary’s approach to telling her own story during the general election campaign — some strategic, some tactical and one insurmountable.

The first flaw was not having a single, powerful, simple story and sticking with it. (Something for which Obama was famous.) This was compounded by the fuzziness and inherent blah-ness that made it impossible for the Plugger story to resonate.

A second, strategic flaw was writing a closing story that didn’t have Hillary Clinton at its center, let alone as its hero. (She was, in fact, not really the hero of any of her own stories. In one, she was the dutiful worker bee. In another, she explicitly made her various constituencies, personified in her videos, the center of attention. And in the backstory, she stood in for all women.) In the end, she was a bulwark. This last chapter was a defensive, finger-in-the-dike tale. A reaction to circumstances rather than the proactive, affirming vision represented by Stronger Together.

And damn, it really should have worked. I mean, building walls? Registering Muslims? Grabbing pussies? Not to mention the heights of political incompetence and depths of policy knowledge. This was a one-of-a-kind opponent who, by all that is right and good, should have self-immolated months before. Reminding people of that fact should have been enough.

A big reason it wasn’t enough was a major tactical flaw, related to the first flaw mentioned above: the campaign allowed itself to be thrown off its game. Intentionally set or not, they fell into the trap of reacting to events, instead of controlling them. They didn’t see this — or they did, and just didn’t know how to deal with the one-of-a-kindness of our first reality TV candidate. The normal rules simply did not apply. Yes, presidential campaigns aren’t waged or won with facts, and stories are essential. But typically these stories — based on nostalgia or fear or lies or whatever — require some internal coherence to hold up. In 2016, that went out the window.

This was compounded by an overarching flaw: hubris. Understandable, because really, who the hell thought that Mr. Cheetos ever had a shot? Not me. I never imagined that so many millions of people would so eagerly embrace or so willingly look past his ... (fill in the blank; you’ve read this list from me before). This led to electoral overreach (maybe we’ve got a shot in Utah!) and a much-too-late pivot toward directly addressing a serious threat — which, as noted above, they never did quite figure out.

What they missed was that Trump inverted Hillary’s it’s-not-really-about-me approach. His story was literally all about him.

His character was his campaign. He was able to say anything, no matter how much or how quickly it contradicted something else he had said, and it didn’t matter. He was able to spit on accepted political “norms” (more on that another time maybe) and more specifically upend Republican dogma without consequence. As a reality entertainment star, he was playing a part. His words were simply set dressing. In this world, once a persona has been established (villain, two-timer, backstabber, straight talker, etc.), all the audience requires is a steady repetition of favorite catchphrases and applause lines ("lock her up!"), and an ongoing and ideally escalating series of thrills and cliffhangers.

Not only did this keep his core supporters satisfied throughout a long campaign, but it left the Clinton campaign (thanks to its closing story) — and the press, which also had no idea what to do with a problem like Trump — chasing and responding to an ever-expanding set of outrageous statements, lies, contradictions and logical impossibilities. Baiting and switching. Bobbing and weaving. (How much of this was intentional on his part, how much was the calculation of his team and how much was sheer Id-driven happenstance is still up for debate.)

Instead of adding up to an unimpeachable argument against him, it buzzed like a swarm of gnats — impossible to hold onto and more annoying than anything else. If you weren’t predisposed to recoil from his very orange hair, or had no deep interest in politics or policy, it all and all-too-quickly became background noise.

Oh, and that press I mentioned? Say hello to the insurmountable flaw. The egregiousness of the national journalistic corps knows few bounds. (Pardon my tarring of the entire media world with a single brush, but this was an amazingly widespread weakness.)

On the one hand, they were clearly outmaneuvered by a superior savant of an opponent. I’m not sure it’s fair to blame them for having a hard time figuring out how to deal with a lifelong conman and mercurial egomaniac like Donald J. Trump. But I do, believe me I do. That’s their friggin’ job. One at which they continue to struggle, and fail.

And on the other hand? If anything, that was worse. Where they really shredded just about any possibility of Hillary’s stories gaining traction was in their dogged determination to act as Javert, turning every action, email and decision into a presumed scandal and refusing to accept “there’s nothing here” for an answer — and making damn sure that their readers and viewers would have great difficulty ever reaching that conclusion. She certainly has her flaws, and could rightfully be dinged for unforced errors before and during the campaign, but we were in a “Hillary Clinton: Ogre Or Troll? Opinions Differ.” echo chamber.

I sound like a Hillary apologist. Fair enough. A good candidate — a better candidate? — may have found a way to overcome this, to get around the press. A singular candidate certainly did. But try this thought experiment: If Hillary had been running against Cruz, or Rubio, or Bush, do you think the “first woman president” story would still have been pushed all the way to the furthest back burner of election coverage? Or compare 2008 coverage specifically focused on The First Black President story to treatment of 2016’s First Female President. Even when the Obama story hit a speed bump, it was more often that not because of race (see: Jeremiah Wright, Kenya, Michelle’s’ nonexistent Whitey tape, etc.)

Also too: We can and should argue about the role played in the election by James Comey and other nefarious outside actors (gerrymanderers, vote suppressers, hackers, etc.). Votes were swung, no doubt.

But we rely on the press to sift through the haystacks and find the actual needles. This time, they acted as if the entire pile was HIV-infected hypodermics. There really were Clinton Rules.

Maybe it was familiarity breeding contempt. Maybe it was a perversion of the already perverse equal time, “both sides do it” instinct. Maybe it was an uncontrollable Pavlovian response conditioned by the modern-day requirement for ready/fire/aim breaking news. Maybe it was, fatefully and painfully enough, because the media assumed along with the rest of us that Trump was toast and decided to focus their energies elsewhere. (The conventional wisdom had to come from somewhere, after all.) Whatever the reasons, she was always walking ten miles through the snow to get to and from work, uphill both ways.

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So no, I don’t think it was absence of story that doomed the Clinton presidency. There was plenty of story — too much story — to go around.

It just wasn’t strong enough and sharp enough to stop a uniquely devious and despicable black swan candidate, abetted by an exceptionally ineffectual press corps, from besting a traditionally run, overconfident, moderately well-executed campaign. (I say moderately, but in retrospect whatever happened to the much-vaunted, micro-targeted Clinton GOTV effort that was going to be worth at least a percentage point or two? Never mind.)

Like many aspects of the election, a comparison of the two sides’ stories kind of misses the point, trying to force equivalence where there can be none. (See? Journalism is hard.)

Which leads (finally!) to what you’ll get in part four: Does any of this teach us anything? Because believe it or not, this series is not intended to be a completely useless intellectual exercise.

Once upon a time, part two.

So. The story thing.

This backward look isn’t designed just to get everyone all depressed again. I want to think about what lessons we can take from the campaign, so we avoid fighting and losing battles the same way for the next four years.

Let me avoid answering that directly by first questioning the premise of whether the Clinton general-election campaign had a story or not. No argument from me that she wasn’t as laser focused as Trump on a small set of issues, and she practically reveled in the sheer quantity of policy proposals and position papers that filled up her website. She could have honed her presentation further, and made a stronger, more consistent presentation of her economic message.

But she did try to turn her wonkishness into an asset by emphasizing her workhorse, prose-more-than-poetry approach to campaigning and (crucially) governing. The story around this could be defined in appropriately uninspiring language as, “I’m not flashy, but I will always work my hardest to get the job done.” Which, despite being true, had the unfortunate distinction of following on the heels of one of the most inspiring political figures in generations. (Obama. I mean Obama, people.)

Okay, so maybe there was a story there, but it was a lackluster one that couldn’t be turned into a rallying cry, or open itself up to allow different audiences beyond a small set of Pluggers to see themselves in it.

There was another campaign story, however, that was more stirring and more inviting: Stronger Together. From the very first campaign video (even before that tag line was in place), the sense of inclusiveness, the willingness to directly address traditionally marginalized populations and the optimistic idea that we can be more powerful when we stand united was the core of a story that, but for 80,000 or so votes, we would currently be retelling and holding up as a masterful achievement. But ultimately this story was pushed off toward the sidelines. It never went away, but circumstance and calculation led in another direction.

And that was the story the campaign stuck with through the fall, what I’d call, “Can you believe this guy?” Presented variously in serious, shocked, mocking and alarmist tones, it was a story intended to highlight the historic, and historically threatening, reality of Donald Trump as president. It was supposed to be a wakeup call — to Democrats and progressives, to “mainstream” Republicans, to right-thinking people everywhere. It was a very simple, very scary story: We can’t let this happen.

So while there may not have been a single story thread from campaign’s start to its bitter end, there was in the final months a faceoff between two stories. Make America Great Again v. Keep American Sane Already.

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All of which is remarkable, when you step back from the day-to-day campaign and remember that Hillary was going to be our first female president.

This was supposed to be huge. And unlike 2008, this year she embraced the ceiling-breaking nature of her run. Yet it was always as a representative of a greater, deserving, longsuffering “we,” not a triumphant “I” — she was just plugging away on behalf of other women. Clearly she recognized the inspiring nature of this story, and knew that there were millions of women and men passionate about what she represented. It was a rallying cry she could use in stump speeches (and catchphrases: I’m With Her).

But it was never the overt center of the campaign — in part I think because they assumed the history-about-to-be-made was a story that had a life and energy of its own; a story they could leverage for free. What they didn’t bank on was this story becoming completely subsumed by a different kind of history-making story.

Even without that motivational tale, though, the other ones the campaign rolled out seem like they should have been good enough. Unfortunately, there turned out to be several fatal flaws with her approach — some strategic, some tactical and one insurmountable.

And on that cliffhanger, stay tuned for part three!

Once upon a time, part one.

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. 

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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.

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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.