This ridiculously named book is not, as you would be forgiven for thinking, a thriller but a “fly’s eye” account of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Inevitably, Obama comes out of the book as much more of a conventional politician than his campaign, or indeed Wolffe himself would like.
Obama is a storyteller, and storytellers are liars. Storytelling is a tremendously powerful way of communicating political ideas, but the facile stories that politicians tell, from McCain’s ‘Joe the Plumber’ (who was neither a plumber nor named Joe) to David Cameron’s mythical ‘black man’, are in fact ways of concealing the truth rather than exposing it.
Journalists are trained to immediately ask themselves ‘why is this person lying to me?’ when being told a story of any kind. We should develop the same discipline ourselves, especially when listening to politicians. This is so because the art of storytelling is the art of concealment. Storytelling relies on deception, on precis and, most tellingly, on drama. Real life as experience by real people cannot be accurately turned into a story without editorialising. Which is to say, lying.
Bad storytellers are bad because they do not follow these rules, and this is because they try to provide a facsimile of the experience they are relating. My Mum does this. She tells you every single detail of the incident she’s relating,to the point that the procedural part of the story takes up the vast majority of the telling and submerges the point of it beneath an accretion of redundant detail. She can’t edit herself. The act of editing is central to the act of storytelling. What do we leave out? That’s the key question that presents itself when one is considering how to tell a story.
Obama and his functionaries are fond of talking about the ‘narrative’ of the campaign. Whenever their campaign is not going well, they seem to remark that they have ‘lost the narrative’. The ideal state of affairs for a political campaign is to have the media report the narrative as the candidate sees it. Losing control of the narrative means that some other viewpoint is being represented.
There’s a particularly telling moment in this book when Obama is addressing a crowd commemorating the Selma to Montgomery marches in which he tells a story about how his parents came to meet because of those marches, partly to try to establish his credentials as someone invested in the civil rights movement; his personal history meant that he had a strongly atypical upbringing for a black man, and there was the ever-present suspicion of foreignness hanging over him. It’s a relevant story, one that seems to have the desired effect. The only problem is that it isn’t true: Obama’s parents met several years before the marches concerned.
It’s a small lie, perhaps one that can be passed off as an exaggeration, or as true in spirit if not in fact. But it would be a mistake of enormous proportions to believe that Obama is something other than a politician, willing to bend the truth in order to achieve power.
I don’t highlight this story to try to paint Obama as some sort of lizard in disguise, but to point out the obvious, that he’s a man, fallible and subject to enormous pressures. There are countless other examples in this book of times that he contorted his way out of a previously held but now inconvenient position, just as Hilary Clinton or John McCain also did.
Codename: Renegade has many flaws, not least of which is that it’s far too long, too repetitive and, ironically, has little sense of narrative structure. But towering over these faults is the author’s unabashed admiration for his subject, a prejudice that means that he gives Obama the most favourable interpretation at every turn. Obviously Wolffe reports the story about the Selma to Montgomery story – that’s how I know about it – but he fails to provide the crucial analysis of it and similar incidents that would help place Obama in the right context.
He does debunk a few myths about the campaign, most significantly that the famous internet portion of the campaign was responsible for the enormous amount of money Obama was able to raise in the early stages of his campaign. In fact, nearly all of his early funding came from traditional Democratic party supporters and other funding channels; the idea that Obama’s campaign was some sort of grassroots revolution is simply not true.
To the British observer, Obama strongly resembles our own Tony Blair, also swept into power on the back of a disastrous incumbent, and a ruthlessly controlled campaign. Like Blair he has a high opinion of himself and can switch from wonkish policy to his man of the people act to mawkish bilge at a moment’s notice. Like Blair he bears the expectation of an entire nation, to which he can add the expectation of the entire world that, as a result of his administration, things will be different. Obama himself seems to know that this expectation is ludicrously high, but that won’t stop his supporters being disappointed when he fails to deliver the national transformation he seems to promise.
Obama claims to be a pragmatist, and I suspect that Blair would say the same thing about himself. Their problem is that the ran their campaigns as idealists, and the concomitant expectation is entirely their own doing. It seems impossible that Obama could be as bad a president as George W. Bush – surely the worst president since Herbert Hoover – but the jury is out on whether he can live up to even a fraction of the hype.
As Obama is on his way to the Capitol to take the oath of office, George W. Bush turns to him to bemoan the presidential pardon system with these words: “I know there’s the unfettered authority, but there’s something wrong with the system where the privileged have the access but the others don’t.” It’s a startling moment, Bush giving voice to such liberal thoughts. But, Bush’s words won’t echo down the ages. Not because they aren’t right, but because he entirely lost control of the narrative. We can only wait to see if Obama can keep control of it long enough to do something worthwhile.
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