So, apparently the White House is having Big Debates over whether they should actually try to explain their economic policy.
President Obama, in trying to be the anti-Bush, has always been hesitant about salesmanship. Take Libya. The name for our Libya incursion, "Operation Odyssey Dawn," emerged from a naming protocol for military operations, similar to the system for naming hurricanes. Recent politicians overrode the military names in favor of grandiose public relations stunts. The last war opened with a name that forced the media to repeat “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” until the word “freedom” sautered itself to the invasion in our brains. The last time we enforced a no-fly zone the politicians called it “Operation Provide Comfort.”
After eight years of public relations as policy, it’s refreshing to see a president refuse to interfere with his generals. But it shows that Obama lacks respect for the power of language, unlike his Rovian predecessor.
Barack Obama's presidency suffers from an unease about salesmanship. He disdains branding.
Substance over style is a great philosophy. It’s nerdism at its core, and I'm proud my president embraces it. However, as any graphic designer will explain, style is substance. What’s the cliché? Form is content.
This is how brains work—we sort the world in shorthand. Someone says “liberal media” and our brains call up an archetype and look for it. The more expertise you develop in a topic, the more refined and numerous the archetypes your brain can apply. Skilled Washington hands saw Obama’s move as a subtle middle finger to beltway PR jocks. The rest of us didn’t notice, because he only spoke to the experts.
In Adam Levin’s The Instructions, my favorite novel of 2010, the young narrator, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, studies with a black mentor. The mentor says, basically, “A guiding black character carries certain associations, so don’t write me as that guy from the Green Mile. Pay attention to what you signify.”
The Instructions is the latest in an American tradition of coming-of-age novels. From the Red Badge of Courage to Huck Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, something about American idealism makes us excel at the genre, the way Scandinavia seems to inspire mystery novels and earnest moralizing.
Obama, the new kid in Washington, D.C., ought to re-read the books. Like Holden Caulfield, Obama has just enough experience to notice the perversions of his new society, but he still hasn’t figured out how he wants to communicate with it.
Your English teacher probably characterized the central conflict of coming of age novels (bildungsroman for those who’d rather type one word than four) as youthful innocence encountering a sleazy society. The real conflict is a struggle to reconcile integrity and utility. However inconsistently, these young characters nurture a code of morals. As kids, they have to—they’re told that once we leave high school the petty bullshit stops, so figure out the type of adult you’re going to be. So they march forth, armed with a personal code, and the world couldn’t give a shit.
As Americans, we were told you can do anything you put your mind to. As new adults, we realize our futures depend on other people. An individual’s force of will is insignificant, which means despite one’s code of personal morals, the morals of strangers determine his success.
Getting shit done, then, depends on presenting oneself to millions of equally potent creatures of will. To survive, one must augment ones behavior. The battle is to maintain a sense of self while trimming the sails of one’s personality.
Gurion takes the hardest route—he rallies those potent wills to his service. Holden is weaker. He choreographs his behavior in order to impress girls, but the swamp of perverts and screwballs will never part for him.
For Holden, Gurion and Obama, the question is one of presentation. Society is irrational and overpowering, so getting the job done requires compromise. We spend a lifetime negotiating the border between reasonable compromise and selling out.
In terms of salesmanship, Obama negotiates this border like a rebel pacifist, David Bry wearing sweatpants to a first date, a PR Gandhi. Obama the pitchman refuses to even approach the sell-out line.
In terms of policy, Obama has erred resolutely on the side of the paycheck. He sold out the public option to guarantee heath care reform. His stimulus was full of tax cuts. Guantanamo is open. Goldman Sachs gets the same free pass they got under Bush. By refusing to enter the PR fray he has lost legitimate policy momentum.
For years, Republicans blatantly used the term “small government” to excuse custom-made markets for campaign donors. The economic collapse shoved that corruption in everyone’s face. Fox News frantically rewrote history, but one good Obama speech could have described the new archetype, and made certain legislative positions political poison. If the White House even clumsily applied their political leverage to an ideology caught red-handed, Republican politicians would have hastily distanced themselves from their oil, pharmaceutical and Wall Street friends. Senators would have stumbled over each other in a race to regulate Wall Street. Instead Rahm Emmanuel had to trade favors with Republicans just for the opportunity to hold an up-or-down vote.
Obama refused to stoop to bumper sticker branding, so he inherited the conversation the media gave him. His style hurt his content.
As an insider, Obama recognized blatant D.C. hypocrisy. (He clearly understood being pro-corporate as a right-wing thing, so by helping Wall Street, he considered himself bipartisan.)
Meanwhile, most of us couldn’t spot a blatant Washington lie if Paul Ryan were hooked to a polygraph. We’re not mavens. Obama thought “death panel” was so stupid it would self destruct. But in cable news politics, even imaginary weaknesses get attacked like steak in a hyena park. Because Obama didn’t attack “death panel” for the dirty lie that it was, he signified to the cable news universe that it was true. The same goes for not prosecuting Bush and Cheney for torture. And for not prosecuting Gonzalez and Rove for firing US Attorneys who failed to investigate Bush’s enemies fast enough. Obama thought he was staying above the partisan fray. Instead he was declaring their innocence.
Context signifies. Form is content.
Obama is a sellout without being a salesman, the opposite of what I’d want him to be. He’s still new to the society of politicians, the insane high school that is cable news in Washington D.C. To resist the D.C.’s temptations, he isolates himself from the posturing like a sullen teenager. He wears his PR tactlessness like a punk rock hairdo. He refuses engage society on its terms, then he can’t seem to figure out why nobody likes him.
I once tutored a high school student who kept writing about drugs for a class project we would publish for parents. “Keeping it real,” I told her, “means knowing your audience.”
Salesmanship is a fight for your audience’s limited attention. As Chip Kidd puts it in his coming of age novel, The Cheese Monkeys, communication is a war. Everything tells a story, and if you don’t tell your story, someone louder or catchier will.
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