The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush

Rating:
Summary: Thinly veiled partisan bile
Review: "Evan Cornog's masterful new look at the American presidency explores the ways our presidents craft persuasive personal narratives and how their storytelling can capture the public imagination and build the support necessary to govern," exclaims the flyleaf. In reality, this is an object lesson in how the disingenuous journalist can craft their stories to appear as scholarly research when, in fact, they are just old fashioned partisan campaigning.

Cornog's book should serve as a warning to anyone who believes the media are "objective": Cornog is an associate dean for plannig and policy at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and publisher of the Columbian Journalism Review.

My copy of "Power and the Story" is now loaded with slips of paper, each bookmarking a lie or distortion in Cornog's campaign tract. Cornog claims that the old Soviet Union was an American stereotype rooted in habitual ignorance or modern prejudice. Just what does Cornog find admirable about the old Soviet Union? Its gulag system? Its forced exile of minorities? Like others who apparently felt that acceptance of the Soviet Union was the right thing, Cornog casts Ronald Reagan's declaration of the Soviet Union as a message "inadequate to the complexities of the world." Why do people like Cornog come out and specifically say what was good and admirable about the Soviet Union?

In Cornog's view, Lyndon Johnson embodied the Texas Populist Tradition while George W. Bush is rooted in the Conferdate past. The single tenuous reference to support this theory is to yet another overtly partisan screed. This reminds me of Stalin citing Lenin as a persuasive authority.

Time after time, Cornog bases his assertions on the assertions of other partisan and sometimes thoroughly discredited sources such as Joseph Wilson whose partisan claims were debunked by investigative committees on both sides of the Atlantic. But such minor details cannot deter a rabid partisan like Cornog from his appointed rounds. He is a part of the journalistic community, where truth is apparently the first casualty.

In the final analysis, Cornog offers sophmoric history of how - big surprise - Presidential campaigns weave legends around their candidate and how history distorts them. He pays no attention to how determined such posthumous efforts can be, as in the case of John F. Kennedy. All of his contemporary sketches are clearly skewed: Democrats are all saintly, Republicans evil.

In all, this is just another anti-Bush rant. What makes it disturbing is that the author is someone who apparently is an "educator" of future journalists. With Cornog's work as an example, we can whistle goodbye to whatever shreds of honesty and objectivity remain in journalism.

Jerry

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent history and great campaign guide
Review: This is a very smart book. The Power and the Story pulls together presidential history from George Washington to George W. Bush, media theory, and Cornog's own wisdom to analyze the importance of storytelling in presidential politics. We may know on some level that our presidential candidates are crafting life stories for themselves to advance or facilitate their political futures-both in reality, like John Kerry choosing to go to Vietnam, or in myth, like Kerry's campaign film created by a protege of Steven Spielberg-but Cornog shows how that tradition began, how these stories are manufactured, and why they work-or don't. Cornog gives us a powerful filter through which to interpret and evaluate modern political campaigning; this is the best single theory for understanding presidential politics I've ever read. An added pleasure is that the book is written lucidly and contains a breadth of historical knowledge that is quite remarkable. Combining literature, myth, history and current events, Cornog uses references from Herodotus to Jane Austen to September the 11th, all in an inconspicuous but highly useful way. Before an election this important, everyone should read The Power and the Story.

Rating:
Summary: Stuff You Knew, Stuff You Suspected
Review: This is a view of presidential "spin" throughout American history. Our Presidential war heroes aren't limited to the few that we ordinarily think of (Grant, T. Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy); it was also Washington's success in the Revolution that led him to the Presidency. Andrew Jackson beat the British in 1815 during the Battle of New Orleans. Who cares if the war was already over, or if Roosevelt picked a fight with Cuba specifically to look good? They're still heroes!

Cornog notes that the truth is not always relevant to the story. For instance, the Washington-and-the-cherry-tree story is apocryphal. Likewise GW Bush's inflating of Saddam Hussein's pursuit of the weapons of mass destruction. He points out that there's a cycle to the story, that it's sent to the press, which itself behaves as an actor and chorus in interpreting and relaying it to the public, and then as an audience as well, by reacting and allowing the story to return to its source for reinterpretation and re-dissemination.

In some cases, the story becomes part of the president's "next life." Former presidents or even non-presidential statesmen, in publishing their memoirs, have tried to change the focus or the blame on some of the more negative stories about them by attempting to put them in a different context. In some cases the attempt was successful (George Washington and the tree didn't even come out until after he had died, but it's so central to the myth that it was accepted), others not so much (Nixon convincing himself that the decision to invade Cambodia was right by repeatedly watching "Patton", as noted in H. R. Haldeman's memoir).

It's even more clear in the light of the 2004 Presidential campaign that the election will likely be decided by the power of the stories told about the candidates, and how they react (or fail to react) to those stories. There have already been several examples of this: Jimmy Carter's "outsider" story played well the first time, but couldn't be used in 1980 and his 1979 "malaise" speech, combined with Reagan's "There you go again" in the debate doomed him to lose to Reagan. Again, it didn't even matter that Carter's statement that generated Reagan's response was actually correct. "There you go again" became the story. In 1984, Walter Mondale tried using the truth when he said that [Reagan] will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." Well the truth hurts, and it damaged Mondale in the polls. And again, Reagan had a line that effectively ended the debate when he said, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." For those of you who saw the debate, the look on Mondale's face said basically, "yeah, this one's over."

My only complaint with Cornog's work is that it's rather brief; I would have like to see a little more backstory on several of the incidents cited in the book. But perhaps this book can be used as a springboard for readers who can later pick and choose the presidents that they'd like to learn a little more about.