Neil Stockley

Lessons in political communications from the “Mark Zuckerberg of activism”

In today’s Guardian, Adam Price calls on the “dismal” European left to learn from its American counterpart.  According to Price, “the real secret to progressive success” is the wisdom of Professor Marshall Ganz, of the Hauser Centre at Harvard. Price calls Ganz “the Mark Zuckerberg of activism” and says:

At the core of his teaching is the idea that leaders must build a public narrative explaining their calling, a sort of progressive elevator pitch in three parts: why they feel called to act (story of self), how this act relates to the audience (story of us) and what urgent challenge this action seeks to address (the story of now).

Price goes on:

It sounds simple (which is part of its success), but if you doubt its power take a look at a then little-known Senatorial candidate’s speech in the Boston Democratic convention in 2004. You’ll hear how a son of a Kenyan goat-herder running for [the] Senate (self) was a symbol of American meritocracy (us) threatened by the policies of the Bush White House (now).

I think Price has identified the correct framework for politics.  Done properly, “the story of self” establishes the politician’s or leader’s right to be heard, as well as his or her credibility and sense of authenticity.  Most importantly, they will embody and symbolise the other aspects of their narrative.  Price cites Barack Obama as the best example, but he could also have mentioned:  

•  Winston Churchill, who showed great personal courage by staying in London throughout World War II;

• Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter who worked her way to the very top and, once at Number 10, toiled day and night; and

•  Tony Blair, who looked and sounded like a young, modern new leader in the mid 1990s and then set out modernising the Labour Party while promising a New Britain and, later, “Cool Britannia”.

There’s more to it.  The Blair example shows how the “the story of us” can be “the story of the party” or “the story of the country”. The successful leader will tell both of these.  The story of the party demonstrates values in action.  In telling it, the leader will eschew talk about the past and show how the party can be relevant to the needs and expectations of the electorate.  

The story of the country explains the leader’s vision, where s/he thinks the country has been, what’s right and wrong, and where it should go next.  

Each UK party leader faces his own challenges in telling these stories.  As Price says:

Flash forward to Ed Miliband and we see the source of his difficulty. Miliband has a plausibly good story of now (“responsible capitalism”), a so-so story of us (“squeezed middle”) but hardly any story of self – so we fill in the blanks with our own version: David’s brother, Gordon’s spad, or the son of England’s greatest Marxist theorist (my favourite).

David Cameron has a story of self, even if it’s one he would never have chosen (his tragic family experience).  He also looks and sounds like a prime minister.  And he has a strong story of now (paying down the debt).  But Cameron’s story of the party is incomplete — the Conservative brand has still not been detoxified — and his story of the country (“the Big Society”) goes way over most people’s heads.

Nick Clegg has a story of the party (working with the Conservatives in the national interest; a softer heart than the Tories and a harder head than Labour). His story of self (successful career in Europe) appeals to liberals, but was derailed by the tuition fees debacle.  Since the start of the year, Nick has been fighting hard to tell his own story of now, separate from the coalition’s.  It’s still too early to say if the voters are buying.  Beyond that, however, lies the old chestnut, a Liberal Democrat story of the country that people will understand and believe in.

Let’s see who breaks this logjam first.

To convince people about climate change, you need to mention climate change

We sometimes hear suggestions that climate change advocates should stop talking about “climate change” or “global warming” and try to reframe the issues by using less alarmist phrases like “clean energy”.

I agree that horror stories, based on “Frankenstein’s monster” / “end of the world is nigh” frames and narratives, aren’t persuasive.  Some climate sceptics can be won over by stressing the additional benefits of policies to cut carbon emissions, such as saving money or creating local jobs.  There’s a bigger point here. We need to make sure that environment and economic policies reinforce one another.

But that’s not the same as cutting out nearly any reference to “climate change”, the preferred strategy of the Obama administration. 

In his State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned “climate change” just once — compared with no mentions in the 2011 address and two the year before.  But he used the terms “energy” and “clean energy” more than twenty times.   “Carbon pollution” is another favourite of the Obama team.

The issues play very differently on the other side of the Atlantic.  Fewer Americans than Brits acknowledge human-made climate change.  People in the US take more partisan stances, with Democrats much more likely than Republicans to be climate realists. . That’s all the more reason to heed the recent comments about the president’s speech by University of Colorado Professor Max Boykoff:

[T]alking only about clean energy omits critical biological and physical factors that contribute to the warming climate. “Clean energy” doesn’t call to mind the ways we use the land and how the environment is changing. Where in the term is the notion of the climate pollution that results from clear-cutting Amazon rain forests? What about methane release in the Arctic, where global warming is exposing new areas of soil in the permafrost?

“Clean energy” also neatly bypasses any idea that we might need to curb our consumption. If the energy is clean, after all, why worry about how much we’re using — or how unequal the access to energy sources might be?

And terms such as “carbon pollution” ignore that climate change isn’t just a carbon issue. Some greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, do not contain carbon, and not all carbon-containing emissions, such as carbon monoxide, trap heat.

He concluded:

Calling climate change by another name creates limits of its own. The way we talk about the problem affects how we deal with it. And though some new wording may deflect political heat, it can’t alter the fact that, “climate change” or not, the climate is changing.

Political storytellers to watch in 2012 (1): Barack Obama seeks re-election

Candidate Barack Obama was my political storyteller of the year back in 2008, my first year of blogging.  But President Barack Obama has been nowhere near as gifted a communicator and, with the American economy still spluttering and the Democratic base disillusioned, he faces a tough battle for re-election in November.   The election is still a long way off, but right now, the fractious and fragmented race for the Republican nomination candidates, the way it looks like a freakshow, and GOP activists’ reluctance to rally behind “moderate” contender Mitt Romney, seem to be Obama’s best hope. 

Last month, however, we saw the beginnings of what may be a viable narrative for his re-election campaign.  In Osawatomie, Kansas, Obama made a cogent case for an American progressivism that is anchored firmly in the political traditions of Theodore Roosevelt and FDR.   It’s meat and drink to liberals like me.  But we shouldn’t expect a replay of his uplifting “yes, we can” rhetoric of 2008.  As E.J. Dionne jr. has written in a provocative and incisive article, Obama will run this time as the “conservative” candidate, who is defending ordinary Americans from the “radical” Republicans and the risks they represent.  In 2008, Obama used a narrative that was all about hope.  This time, he will have to rely much more on fear.

Let’s see if he can make his romantic (neo-Roosevelt) and pragmatic (right-wing “enemy within”) narratives work together, as one compelling story.

President Obama has an even more demanding challenge: his story will have to be plausible.  Back in 1980, an embattled Democratic president called Jimmy Carter warned voters of the risks to economic and national security posed by Ronald Reagan, the most right wing Republican nominee since Barry Goldwater’s disastrous candidacy sixteen years earlier.  By election day, however, Carter’s economic narrative – his story about his record  - had all but collapsed, as inflation ran at 15.5% and the prime interest rate stood at 21%.

On the eve of poll debate, Reagan asked his famous framing questions (“are you better off than you were four years ago … ?) and suddenly surged into the lead.  Carter was swept away in a landslide.  His efforts to frame the election as a choice between “full opportunity for all” and “the despair of millions who would struggle for a better life” rang hollow when the reality of Carter’s own record was so uninspiring. (1)

Obama won’t be facing Ronald Reagan or anyone like him this year. He is a much better president, politician and campaigner than Jimmy Carter.  Even so, what happened to Carter shows that Obama’s story about the economy must be founded on an economic recovery that looks, sounds and feels real to the American people.   If he fails the basic test of credibility, Carter’s fate will be his also.

(1) See Theodore H. White, America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President 1956-1980 (Jonathan Cape, 1983), Chapter 13. 

Narrativewatch: Obama’s “Sputnik moment”

Obama at Tucson

Learning from Ronald Reagan, master storyteller

In this week’s Economist, the Lexington column says that Barack Obama has been reading Lou Cannon’s well-regarded biography of Ronald Reagan for inspiration.  The president could go to worse places.  After all, Reagan’s party did not have control of both houses of Congress. He too suffered from poor poll ratings and bad mid-term election results in his early years in office. Like Obama, Reagan inherited an economy in a parlous state.  Yet he went on to triumph at the 1984 election, carrying 49 out of 50 states.

Lexington argues, correctly, that Reagan’s experience does not provide a simple formula for Obama to follow.  Nor does Lexington buy all the easy myths about the Reagan presidency.  [For my take, click here.]   But s/he comes to an interesting conclusion:

… Americans warmed to [Reagan] not just because of what he did but also because of the sort of person he was. Mr Cannon argues that his political magic did not reside only in his happiness and folksy charm. His greatness was that “he carried a shining vision of America inside him.” He had a simple belief that nothing was impossible in America if only government got out of the way. In rejecting the idea of limits, says Mr Cannon, he expressed a core conviction of the nation. Mr Obama does not share this belief, and is perhaps right not to. The idea that nothing is impossible in and for America is an illusion. But Americans have never thanked their presidents for telling them so.

In making American exceptionalism his cause, Reagan was a master storyteller,  He understood, instinctively, what political narratives are about and how they work.    He saw that his compatriots feared national decline, in the wake of Watergate, Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, the oil shocks and stagflation of the 1970s.  Reagan offered them a happy ending, expressed powerfully in his ’84 campaign spot, Morning in America.  Above all, he understood the need of the American people — like people everywhere — to have a clear sense of who they are, where they stand and where they are goig.

In his seminal book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, Howard Gardner argues that most leaders’ stories

address the most essential questions raised by human beings and seek to provide satisfying answers to those questions … issues of self, group membership, past and future, good and evil.

Gardner says that the stories of leaders are

created in response to the pervasive need to understand oneself, the groups that exist in and beyond one’s culture and issues of values and meaning.

I have long believed that politicians from moderate left and liberal parties do rather well at reaffirming their comrades’ core convictions about themselves and their political values, but are less adept at expressing the values of those “beyond the base”.  By contrast, Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and it seems, New Zealand’s prime minister, John Key, are good examples of conservative or moderate right politicians who succeeded by playing back or embodying the commonly-held stories of their countrymen and women.

If he is to win a second term, Obama must break this spell, just as Bill Clinton did.  He will need to offer his own “Morning in America”, complete with bold rhetoric about investing in the future and making sure that nobody is left out.  If he doesn’t, someone else will come through with his – or her - new dawn, and I suspect the outcomes will be unpleasant. 

Analytical, pragmatic revolutionaries who see both sides - understanding the leaders from Generation Jones

Do you really know what you’re getting from Generation Jones - the people who now rule much of the world?

Earlier this week, Cari Oke (a fellow Joneser) commented on how leaders from our generation are more likely than our forebears to  strive for the greatest possible agreement when political choices have to be made.

As Gen Jonesers hover on either side of the half-century mark, are we seeing the telltale signs of our empathetic natures? …  President Obama, born in 1961, is well known for his ability to see many sides of an issue and his belief that two sides can be brought together with a little help from a friend. Supreme Court nominee and Joneser Elena Kagan, born in 1960, continues to defy efforts at labeling. The best anyone can do is to call her a moderate.

For years, I’ve noticed and approved of the way “liberal-left” politicians from Generation Jones try  seriously to follow political principles that are once “idealistic” and  “pragmatic”. The obvious example, going right back to the “neoliberal” triumphs of the 1980s, are the concerted efforts to reconcile “social equity” with “economic efficiency”.  Another example is the concerted effort that has been made over the last decade or so to synthesise “economic prosperity” and “environmental sustainability”.

But then I am, after all, a paid-up member of Generation Jones who has supported the New Zealand Labour Party and now the Liberal Democrats.  And that may be one reason why I am more prepared than some Liberal Democrats to cut Nick Clegg (born 1967) some slack as he tries to frame the coalition government’s tough fiscal policies as progressive, as well as responsible.   In today’s Guardian, Nick cites his conversion over fiscal consolidation as an example of accountable politics.  Nick even says:

“I am a revolutionary but I am also a pragmatist.”

The latest example of the Jonesers’ empathetic, thoughtful but somehow ambiguous brand of politics is Australia’s new prime minister, Julia Gillard.  Born in 1961, she is the latest member of Generation Jones to take power.   Her competence and professionalism are not seriously disputed.  Nor is her ability to consult or to engage in serious dialogue on tricky policy issues.  Sounding like a true Joneser, she has promised:

“We will consult, listen and encourage people to give their best and we will work through the nation’s policy challenges with a calm, methodical and analytical approach.”

In his first weeks in the top job, prime minister Gillard has cut a deal with the mining industry over resources taxation – trying to make the government’s “fairness” rhetoric work alongside the industry’s needs. But she has come across as less than forthright over border protection and the processing of refugees.  And the commentators are now asking Gillard to explain what she really stands for and reminding us that you win elections by setting out a clear path to the future.

There’s an even bigger question around Julia Gillard – and Barack Obama and Nick Clegg for that matter.  Even if another of Cari Oke’s observations about my generation sounds a little tongue-in-cheek, it still makes for uncomfortable reading.

While watching the implosion of Joneser General Stanley McChrystal’s career, one has to wonder if the Generation Jones ability to see both sides also allows us to play both sides. Does this characteristic come back to bite us in our once bell bottom clad butts? I could argue either way.

I hope that it doesn’t bite us anywhere.  I am waiting and hoping for Barack Obama, Nick Clegg (though he’s a deputy PM in a coalition government) and Julia Gillard to use their times in the sun to deliver a politics that is new and different in its substance.  A competent, empathetic style of governance is most welcome. Using it to deliver the politics of the “soft heart” and the “hard head”, based on a more environmentally sustainable economy, would be great. 

A few more reasons why my generation isn’t saving the world

Over on Huffington Post, Will Bunch has an interesting piece  about Generation Jones, the cohort of people born between 1954 and 1965.  He argues that Generation Jones is coming to power all over the world. But he’s not satisfied that we’re trying hard enough to solve its problems.  Bunch believes that pragmatism has won out over idealism because our underlying anxiety about careers and personal economic security has left Jonesers with an innate aversion to taking risks.

The Next Greatest Generation? Hardly. The reality is that Generation Jones is showing up just in time, when the planet really does need saving — and we are blowing it, big time. The challenges faced not just by the United States but by the entire world — global warming, a deadly addiction to fossil fuels, governments addled by debt yet unable to stop spending billions on weapons — require bold, boat-rocking risk-takers, people who have looked into the abyss of humankind and are not afraid to make daring moves.

 

This is simply not my Generation Jones … We are careerists — clinging to our conviction that we can change the world not by forceful ideas but by the mere force of our own often-coddled personalities, even if the ideas and passions that once animated our humanity have been buried under pages of resumes and cover letters. 

Ouch.  Bunch goes on to describe Barack Obama and his new supreme court nominee, Eliza Kagan, as case studies of our generation’s cautious careerism and reluctance. And he wonders if the progressive ideals of Obama, Kagan other Jonsesers have now lain dormant for so long that they might never rise again.

I have argued previously that the leaders from Generation Jones need to start putting their political cards on the table and showing what they stand for and what they are going to do with their time in the sun.  That applies to leaders from the moderate left, like Barack Obama and Australia’s prime minister Kevin Rudd, and to those from the moderate right, like New Zealand’s prime minister, John Key.  All have been criticized, including by their own sides, for not being bold or visionary enough.

So I can relate a lot of what Bunch says.   I grew up in New Zealand and not the US. He may be exaggerating parts of his argument for effect.  Yet I can relate to his basic argument. When I was at secondary school, in the late 1970s, the senior teachers gave us stern lectures about how gruesome the job market was going to be.  They were correct.  By the time we got to university, unemployment had reached levels unknown since the great depression of the 1930s.  The two oil shocks added in inflationary pressures and made a grim economic cocktail.  But in my home country’s case, Bunch may be going too far when he claims that for Generation Jones, “progressive ideals were buried”.   For instance, most of our Generation Jonesers supported the ban on nuclear warships visiting New Zealand.

And I suspect that it’s more than just the graduate job market of the 1980s that has made the leaders from Generation Jones wary of taking big political risks and reluctant to embark on big policy projects.   The broader sweeps of politics and the fates of previous risk takers and visionaries have been important too.

Take Barack Obama.  He came of age during the triumph of Reagan and witnessed the death of post-war American liberalism.   American politics was fundamentally transformed during the 1980s and Bill Clinton did not try to turn the clock back – or forwards.

Kevin Rudd would have seen Gough Whitlam’s Labor government come to office in 1972 promising big shake-ups, especially in social and foreign policy.  But Whitlam and co flamed out after just three years.  When Labor returned, in 1983, they were led by Bob Hawke.  Hawke’s government achieved a great deal, especially in the economic areas.  But he branded his administration as reformist rather than radical; Hawke’s leadership style was based on the quest for consensus rather than promoting grand ideological designs. When his successor, Paul Keating, tried to paint big pictures, Australians just wanted the family snapshot.   In 1996, they showed Labor the door – and Rudd himself failed in his first attempt to enter parliament.

His opponents used to mock John Key’s lack of interest in New Zealand’s turbulent politics of the early 1980s.  But he and his Joneser senior ministers remember all too well what happened in the 1990s, when their National Party abandoned the safety of the conservative middle ground and undertook major cuts in social spending and broke the promises they had made to superannuitants (pensioners).  The fourth National government saw its popularity plummet and at the 1993 election saw nearly all of its huge majority melt away.  For many years, the memories of those years provided their opponents with a powerful political weapon.

Now for the big questions: what have Obama, Rudd, Key and the other generation Jonesers who are running the world  learned from their predecessors’ sometimes bitter experiences?  How do they plan to apply that knowledge to the massive challenges they face – most notably in saving our environment for future generations?  And how are their leadership styles different from those of the political leaders that Generation Jones watched on TV in the 1970s and 1980s?

I have a sneaking fear that, in different ways, they don’t know the answer to the first two questions and that the answer to the second is based more on electoral tactics – polls and focus groups – than a clear sense of political ideals and policy strategies. 

Let’s hope this concern is misplaced.  There may be a new cause for hope.  The UK has a new coalition government, whose prime minister, deputy prime minister and half of cabinet were born between 1954 and 1965.  Perhaps they will show us what my generation is really all about. 

The BP oil spill and reframing climate change

Today, the FT’s Fiona Harvey has provided a quick, useful summary of the politics surrounding this week’s climate change talks in Bonn.  This year, “climategate”, whilst overblown, has helped to make the public less receptive to messages about climate change.  She concludes:

… the recession has grabbed all attention, and now the crisis in the Eurozone means European Union countries are far less interested in climate change than they are in the survival of the single currency. As finance is central to any progress on climate change negotiations, the recession could yet be the rock on which these talks founder.

Obama’s lost year and the secrets of political storytelling

The New Yorker of 15 March has a fascinating article by George Packer, called “Obama’s lost year”. Packer traverses the political and strategic mistakes that the president has made, the opportunities he has lost over the past twelve months.  [Sorry – there’s no hyperlink to the full article unless you’re a paying subscriber]

Inevitably, one of the issues that Packer discusses is Obama’s failure to craft a narrative and tell the American people a story about what he is doing, and why he is doing it. 

“Phrasemaking, throughlines, frameworks and narratives simply aren’t the stuff of the Obama press office.”

 Packer draws some important contrasts between Obama and Ronald Reagan, another president who ran into big economic and political problems in his first year.  In so doing, Packer shows us what makes a political narrative work. 

“Reagan could recover from battlefield setbacks because he was fighting a larger war.  His talent for phrasemaking and anecdote derived from having a strong world view: unlike Obama, he began with a set of ideas and found the evidence to match them and the words to dramatize them.”

The article goes on to quote the leading Democratic political consultant, Paul Begala:

“[Reagan’s] point of departure was always philosophical.  He explained how the world works.  Roosevelt did the same thing.”  [emphasis added]

 Reagan blamed the nation’s woes on “decades of tax and tax and spend and spend”.

 Later in the article, top Democratic pollster Geff Garin develops the same point and shows the crucial role that characters – heroes and villains –play in political stories.

“Reagan had a kind of robust narrative with real explanatory power for people.  He had a political narrative that told people what he was doing and what the Democrats were doing: a narrative which is available to Obama: Jimmy Carter left the country in a mass, we’re making changes that are painful now but if we stay the course they’ll succeed, and why would anyone want to go back?”  [emphasis added]

 Notice also how Reagan’s story offered two alternative endings, one good, one bad, and left people to work the rest out for themselves.

 During the last presidential election campaign, I wrote a lot on my blog about Obama’s gifts as a teller of stories.  In fact, I unpretentiously named him the political storyteller of the year for 2008.  But Packer is correct: as president, he has not rendered the country’s story in a way that is memorable and convincing.  To quote Paul Begala:  “[Obama] doesn’t situate it in a philosophy.”

 No, a political narrative is not the same thing as an ideology.  But the experiences of Reagan and Obama show that a successful narrative must be based firmly on a coherent set of ideas.  As Packer puts it:

“To be an effective communicator, a President needs a strong world view, a fundamental vision of why things are and the way they ought to be, which can be simplified into a few key ideas and images – in short, an ideology.  For Obama and his advisers, there is no worse pejorative.”

 The narrative, the story is the most powerful tool that a politician has to explain those ideas, convey the images and make them real to people.