August 26, 2008
Leading Liberal Democrats heading to Denver, Colorado for the Democratic National Convention will be able to see how Barack Obama uses his personal story to present himself as the man of destiny, part of America’s unfolding history and, importantly, the man with a vision for America’s future.The...
go to article »August 11, 2008
There’s a lot more talk about the art of political story-telling at the moment. For instance, CNN.com has an article by Paul Willis, who says that the US presidential election will boil down to whose story voters prefer, even more than where the candidates stand on the issues. And within the Liber...
go to article »August 6, 2008
During the primary season, Barack Obama gave us an object lesson in how political narratives work, engaging both the heart and the head.Now, after a slow start, the McCain campaign shows us how counter-stories really work; in the process, they might be proving something thoroughly unpleasant about A...
go to article »July 24, 2008
Every so often, people ask me for suggestions for the best books to read about modern American politics. For what it’s worth, I usually refer them to the efforts by E.J. Dionne jr. and Godfrey Hodgson to explain the crisis of American liberalism and other big themes in US politics over the last 40...
go to article »June 11, 2008
So the US presidential election moves from the gruelling primary election campaigns to a no doubt brutal general election campaign. A lot of the analysis about the Democratic contest boils down to one question: who created Barack Obama and who destroyed “frontrunner” Hillary Clinton? Looking ahe...
go to article »June 4, 2008
Last Wednesday night, I was pleased to be the guest speaker at the Islington Liberal Democrats’ pizza and politics evening. The subject was political narratives and how they work. This is the second time in six months I have spoken at such an event, so this storytelling thing may catching on.We ...
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How many times have you heard the Liberal Democrats patronised or mocked as: a bit loopy; or well-meaning-but-not-quite-serious; or “limp wrested”? Remember the cartoons of Ming Campbell with a zimmer frame? There are epithets for Nick Clegg now too; I don’t need to repeat them here. And you m...
go to article »April 30, 2008
Happy days were here again. Now the global economy is heading south. For the first time in years, politics is about money, or lack of it. But the way that politicians and voters are responding has raised some interesting questions.Take the US elections. The credit crunch started over th...
go to article »April 20, 2008
Here’s another reason why the US Democratic presidential primaries are so closely fought and why just a few points separate either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton from John McCain.OK, it’s all about narratives, the candidates telling their stories. It’s more than that – the contest is abou...
go to article »April 10, 2008
I have previously blogged that one of Senator John McCain’s big challenges is to decide which story he is going to tell about himself – the maverick or the true conservative. I argued that he couldn’t win by telling both and that he would try to, in effect, fuse the two stories, running as a s...
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