Rags to riches
Let us return to a gentler time in politics, 2004, when a one-term senator from Illinois made one of the keynote speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Though several prominent Democrats addressed the convention, including presidential candidate John Kerry, everyone remembers that other speech. Spiritually, it had been a rough time in America, with an ugly election in 2000 and the terrorist attacks of 2001. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not going well. The economy was picking up, but in a peculiar way. Everyone who owned real estate saw it going up in paper value, and it was easier to get a loan, but only a tiny percentage of Americans seemed to be improving.
This rather unknown young man might have told the audience he had grand ambitions. He might have told them he was intelligent and passionate, that he had integrity, faith, courage, a strong resolve, and that he believed in an old and splendid idea of America that seemed to be slipping away. This is, after all, what most people do when they make speeches. They tell the audience they have a vision. They tell the audience they believe in transparency and accountability and fairness, good governance, that they are tough but compassionate.
(The Junior Senator in 2004)
Barack Obama didn’t do any of that.
On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.
But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place: America, which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before. While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor he signed up for duty, joined Patton's army and marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised their baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA, and moved west in search of opportunity.
And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream, born of two continents. My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential. They are both passed away now. Yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with pride.
I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible. Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, "We hold these truths to he self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles…
What did Barack Obama promise to Americans that night, without making any overt promises? If the son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president, America is still what we think it is, at its best. Despite all the miserable evidence to the contrary you see all around you, anyone with a good idea and a willingness to work hard can make anything happen here. This is the spirit I will fight to renew and to preserve. Obama understood his audience perfectly. It was not a collection of men and women who had been born into wealth and sought to preserve it with tax cuts for the highest income brackets.
It was everyone else.
From 2004 until 2008, when he was elected president, Obama used a technique every writer learns from every writing teacher: show don’t tell. Telling leads to abstraction, to the universal synonyms of organizational goodness, to the passive voice and all the other grammatical ugliness and abomination George Orwell writes about in Politics and the English Language.
Remember, we don’t remember what people tell us to remember. Yet we can’t forget stories of changes and choices. We hold on to the details that make us feel we’re part of the story ourselves: the tin roof shack, the oil rigs, the farms of the Depression, marching across Europe, the possibility of transformation from all of that to what we see and feel on that stage: a confident, articulate, ferociously intelligent young man who might make this possible for my children and grandchildren. Are there abstract ideas in the introduction of his speech? Absolutely. But they are embedded in a narrative sweep from domestic servitude to what we see before us: a man who is destined to be president.
On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama would release a policy idea and bring it to life through true stories and anecdotes. If we choose this, as Americans, that will happen to someone just like you. If he was talking about health care, immigration, gun control, the rights of women, jobs and the economy, he did not present his policy ideas and use universal synonyms for goodness to tell us why they were awesome. He presented his policy ideas and showed us, through arresting anecdotes, why they were the right ideas and decisions for America so that everyone has the ability to do what I did, to transform. He used the status quo: where we are now, after eight years with George W. Bush. Then he presented a clear choice, a brave and quintessentially American choice to change, so that the world’s greatest meritocracy can actually work. He used the actual experiences of actual people to inject emotional truth into his ideas, so we could all hear it, see it, feel it. These anecdotes of change were set in locations across America, wherever he was speaking, so listeners could imagine their own versions of the stories he was telling. Each policy idea plugged into his master story, that insistence on small miracles. The job of the federal government, of a leader, is to ensure that most American story comes true every day, for millions of people.
It’s much more difficult for a president seeking re-election, especially when many of those clear and inspiring Cinderella ideas were — it turned out — impossible to implement. Obama was astonishingly good at campaigning in 2008, when he could promise change and hope. In 2012 he had to couch his promises in regrets and unspoken apologies. He could certainly blame his enemies for blocking his ideas because it was true, but Obama did not want to appear weak. He wanted to appear the way he had appeared in 2004 and 2008, as a special version of one of us. Obama did not make any of the memorable speeches of the 2012 campaign because it’s difficult for a man who gets around in helicopters and luxury jets, surrounded by secret service agents, to sound genuine about his rags to riches story. But his wife could do it.
You see, even though back then Barack was a Senator and a presidential candidate... to me, he was still the guy who'd picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door... he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.
But when Barack started telling me about his family – that's when I knew I had found a kindred spirit, someone whose values and upbringing were so much like mine.
(Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2012)
What were the values Michelle Obama spoke of? Courage and sacrifice and compassion, a real interest in other people and their success, the idea that collective good is necessary for individual achievement. But instead of listing these values, and all the others, from the approved Democratic Party collection, Michelle Obama told anecdotes about her husband, about her family and about his family. She talked about decisions he had made and decisions he would fight for in the future, so that her rags to riches story and his rags to riches story could be theirs, too. I wrote the sentence above, with a list of values, but I’ve already forgotten them. But I will never forget the visible road underneath the passenger side of Barack Obama’s shitty car, and that somehow the driver became president.
Politicians, and their political parties, need narrative thinking more than almost anyone else today. Scandals and lies make for good stories too, and after years of them politicians and lobbyists are near the bottom of the “honesty and ethics” scale in public opinion polls about the professions we admire the most and the least. We don’t trust politicians or believe their instincts, and the parties themselves seem bound up in misinformation and corruption — winning at any cost — instead of public service.
When arrogance and entitlement are set against growing inequality, the worst thing anyone in politics can seem is too fancy. There are ways around it, of course. The Kennedy family used youth and beauty. George W. Bush pretended to be a regular old bumpkin. But these were feints and distractions.
Voyage and return
It’s easy for people around the world to name the current Canadian Prime Minister. This is not usually the case.
(not a normal thing for Canada)
Between 1984, when the last Trudeau retired from politics, and 2015, when his son got the job, most people in cafés and in surveys would still say, “Trudeau?”
Why?
Why did Canadians remember Pierre Elliott Trudeau with such fondness and disdain, and why did Jeopardy contestants name him as PM ten years after his death in 2000? He wasn’t an obvious politician. Populism had moved into the mainstream by his time in office, and we wanted regular people to lead us. So many politicians and CEOs had used the rags to riches story, and so movingly, that it had come to seem natural, more North American, than the old world alternative of noblesse oblige.
(young Pierre Trudeau on the road)
Trudeau was not an ideal candidate in 1965, when he decided to enter federal politics in Canada. He was an academic and an intellectual who had occasionally veered into radicalism. He had grown up wealthy and had gone to all the finest schools. In Quebec, his home province, he was considered an oddball — a bit too anglo, too cosmopolitan. Yet this worldliness was precisely what people found fascinating about him in other parts of the country. When he was a young man, Trudeau travelled around the world for a year. Not with servants and fifteen pieces of luggage, which would have been simple and natural for him, but with a little bag and a scraggly beard. The “Trudeau story” is that this trip, this voyage-and-return, transformed him. He came back as more than a man of privilege, as a wealthy lawyer destined for more lawyerly wealth. In fact, he decided to sacrifice that comfortable and clubby life, that sure thing, for something much more difficult and more meaningful. In a voyage and return story, the hero comes back with something. A ring, perhaps. But Trudeau returned with an idea. Living outside Canada for a year, seeing the rest of the world and its ancient and new troubles, had inspired Trudeau to see Canada as a project. It could be more than a former colony that still whiffed of Great Britain and France, more than a quieter and more modest version of the United States. Deep in the Canadian heart, something was different. We were devoted to justice and fairness in a way others weren’t, only we did not act on it — not with courage and creativity. That was a problem he could fix. This was a country full of immigrants from around the world, not a melting-pot like the United States but something else: a multicultural nation with two official languages. Trudeau did not set out to transform Canada so much as tell what he saw as its finest story back to itself, and then act decisively to make it all come true. His famous phrases and choices as Prime Minister nearly always go back to a core idea — a master story about the beauty of compromise. It helped that he slid down fancy banisters and dated spectacular young women and broke protocol with the Queen. It looked like he and the American president were from different planets more than adjacent countries. Nixon called him a pompous egghead, an asshole, and a lousy son of a bitch.
“I’ve been called worse things by better people,” Trudeau said.
Trudeau spoke in plain and evocative language, not the jargon of a lawyer or a senior bureaucrat. His famous quotations, the ones we remember, were metaphors — not abstractions.
“Living next to you,” he said, to Americans at a speech in Washington, “is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Almost immediately the phrase caught on, and other writers and thinkers expanded on the metaphor. In one line, Trudeau summed up a complex and tricky mess of a relationship. He understood narrative technique and he understood tone and voice. Canada, at the time, was his to sum up. Almost fifty years later the line seems distinctly Canadian. When Canadians understood — surely they were the mice — it made things easier and funnier when the Americans began stamping about. Do we scurry away or do we trot to the bedside table and watch with amusement?
(being naughty at the Queen’s house)
When Canadians were debating the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967, Trudeau summed up his feelings — and defended his government’s bill — with another evocative declaration. “There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
In both of these cases, there was a jargon-laded, abstract way to describe, legally and in the passive voice, what it meant to feel Canadian. And in both cases, as ever, Trudeau did something else.
Like Obama and any other leader who has been in office for some time, Trudeau came to seem predictable and ineffectual. So he would go back to his defining story. Prime Ministers can’t grow beards and travel the world with a satchel. But they do take holidays.
(Pierre and Justin)
Trudeau would jump in a canoe and paddle the rivers of Canada’s north, to get in touch with something primal and essential. He would return with what seemed a new understanding, a new filter, a new way back into that Canadian idea. His opponents despised him then and, all these years later, his ideological enemies fantasize about bringing him back to life and killing him again. Journalists called him “charismatic,” but he wasn’t handsome like a Kennedy and there was a hint of shyness in the way he spoke, especially to a crowd. He remains Canada’s prime minister to so many people so many years after his death because no one else has been brave enough to use narrative instead of nonsense — not even his son.
For me it is the combination or the story and the personal that is so powerful and inspiring. And it is also about the sincerity of delivery. I have the greatest admiration for those who can hit the sweet spot. have started trying to develop that skill for myself but definitely have a way to go. I do know that I miss those inspirational story tellers in the political realm, they gave you hope!
Reading this, I am reminded of how much I looked forward to your columns in The Gateway.