What to Listen For in O’s Big Speech

When Barack Obama steps to the podium in the House of Representatives tomorrow night, to make yet another “most important speech of his career,” he’s going to talk about “fighting for the middle class” and “reversing the overall erosion in middle class security” — or so the White House advance team says.  But will anyone believe him, or care? That depends on how he frames his message.

So far, all we’ve heard is a list of new programs: making it easier for people to care for dependents, repay student loans and save for retirement.  Each one could have a sizeable impact on the family budget in several million households. But such lists don’t have a sizeable impact — in fact, they rarely have much impact at all — on the national political scene.

What makes an impact is not policies, but stories. Or rather, a story — a single, overarching narrative that the public can remember, recite, and respond to with enthusiasm.

George Lakoff is just the best-known of the experts on political language who have been telling us for years that stories are the heart of politics. As Lakoff recently wrote, a successful movement must have:

a popular base;

organizing tools;

an overall narrative, with heroes, victims and villains;

a generally accepted, morally-based conceptual framing;

a readily recognizable, well-understood language;

Progressive have the first two, he notes. But today, only conservatives have the last three:

“The conservatives are winning the framing wars again — by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has. But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner. … A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand.”

Obama may be the most gifted moral storyteller to reach the political top in a long time. But if the script he reads from is not a gripping tale of good and evil, it’s not likely to change the political landscape very much at all.  And there is every indication that he will use the State of the Union address only to grow the laundry list.

“Campaign speech is all part of one narrative, but now you are making a series of arguments,” Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes said in a recent interview. And arguments are just about all you’ll find in the op-ed in last Sunday’s Washington Post by David Plouffe, the wizard of the 2008 Obama campaign who has been called back to active duty to save the day in 2010. It’s all about “change,” Plouffe predictably explains. The voters want a new kind of government, one that will “help foster the security of the middle class … instead of a government that works for the entitled and special interests.”

Lots of politicians have turned that abstraction into a powerful morality tale, with heroes, victims, and villains. But not Plouffe. All he offers is yet another list of policies. They’re good policies — health care reform, job creation, a well-funded recovery act — and Plouffe offers good arguments for them. As Lakoff points out, though, even the best policies and most logical arguments are no substitute for a persuasive moral story.

There’s one more danger Obama speechwriters seem oblivious to. Their message is about economic “security.”  Though they use words like “restoring” and “rebuilding,” which might suggest dynamic change for the better, most Americans hear the word “security” and get a mental picture of circling the wagons to stave off disaster.  That’s the essence of right-wing populism: “rugged individuals,” doing whatever they must do to save themselves from looming threats. The only change they want is a return to the imaginary “good old days” when (they fondly imagine) things did not change, so there was not much to worry about.

Now those right-wing populists identify government itself, and the change it instigates, as the main threat to America. And their paranoia about “big government” is the main threat to the Obama administration’s program. But whenever the president talks about protecting the people against danger — no matter what he names as the source of the danger — he inadvertently encourages the right-wing populist mood, which thrives on warning of impending doom.

So as you listen to the State of the Union address, here’s the question to ask: Am I hearing a simple, convincing, overarching moral narrative about government as the good guy — a source of dynamic innovations battling against society’s evils?  Or am I hearing merely another laundry list of disparate policies, all framed as ways to protect the middle class against a laundry list of threats? If Obama speaks mainly in “list” mode, he — and we — are still in trouble.