Every U.S. president needs a good story to tell voters

The Power and the Story

How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success From George Washington to George W. Bush

Evan Cornog

Penguin: 308 pp., $24.95

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“The Power and the Story” is a light, breezy look at the role of image-making by and for U.S. presidents.

Because we don’t have a parliamentary system of government, in which party leaders make the choice of candidates for prime minister, but a presidential system, in which the selection of leaders is made by the voters, author Evan Cornog argues, candidates for president must “create and circulate stories” about themselves that will appeal to large numbers of people.

And these narratives are of the greatest importance, says Cornog, associate dean at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review. “For all the campaign talk about resumes, issues and qualifications,” he writes, “it is the battle of stories, not the debate on issues, that determines how Americans respond to a presidential contender.”

This is an excessive simplification that deprives the book of the full range of its potential usefulness as a guide to presidential politics.

Issues matter. Look at Abraham Lincoln, who won election in 1860 against three other candidates by standing for preservation of the Union, or at Lyndon B. Johnson, who left the presidency because of the growing unpopularity of a war he had promoted.

Economics matters. It would have had to have been a dull Democrat indeed who could not have toppled Herbert Hoover in the Depression year 1932.

The unexpected matters. The taking of U.S. hostages by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran worked powerfully to unseat Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Yet image -- or, as Cornog calls it in the current academic fashion, the “narrative,” the story -- is an inseparable part of the kaleidoscope of U.S. presidential politics.

No better illustration can be found than in today’s furious competition between Republicans and Democrats to establish a dominant story for their presidential nominees, trying to display each candidate as a more reliable leader to handle the challenges of terrorism.

The contemporary struggle is conducted in the powerful medium of television. But TV is only the most recent manifestation of mass communication. Before it was radio and the movies, and before them the newspaper. In Lincoln’s time, the nation’s new railroad system was delivering newspapers overnight throughout the East and Midwest.

Presidential candidates and their allies have used them all to create favorable images: Lincoln the railroad corporate lawyer became Honest Abe the Rail-Splitter; Andrew Jackson, the populist leader of the newly opened trans-Appalachian states, became Old Hickory, the victor over the British in the Battle of New Orleans.

Cornog looks at some of the most famous images indelibly fastened upon our presidents. The tale about Washington’s cutting down a cherry tree and confessing about it -- “Father, I cannot tell a lie” -- was made up after his death by his biographer, Parson Mason Locke Weems. The story stuck because it exemplified Washington’s widely admired reputation for honesty. Hoover, who had been praised for his organization of war relief in World War II, became forever bound up in national memory with the Depression because it happened on his watch.

Indispensable to the power of stories, Cornog argues, are villains. With relish he lists some who are fixed forever in the nation’s memory: King George III, the Huns of World War I, Hitler and Hirohito in World War II, the communists in the Cold War, today’s “terrorists.”

“Simple antimonies like good and evil, winner and loser get their message across quickly and powerfully,” he writes. “What matter that the message is too often inadequate to the complexities of the world?”

That it does matter demonstrates the limitations of excessive reliance on symbol, on story, in directing the affairs of a huge and powerful nation.