THE STORY

I'm concerned about the election. As scientists and others who study the mind have made clear, and we all knew anyway, humans think in terms of "story"—i.e. we interpret reality as a story, our lives as stories, problems and the solutions to them as stories, etc.

Any good politician, let alone leader, let alone success at almost anything, knows that the story is paramount. Clinton got that, so did Reagan. Carter did in his campaign for president than seemed to abandon using "story" to get his perspective and goals and policies, most of which were good and would have made our country better had he been able to achieve them all including a second term. But he totally lost control of the story and the result was the idea that he was ineffectual, when actually his achievements made the world a better place and if we had followed where he was trying to lead in terms of energy and the environment we could have avoided all kinds of problems that came up under Reagan's policies, etc.

Obama had a great story, embodied it in the convention speech that got him first noticed and honed it some in his 2008 campaign, but then let the Republicans, the rightwing Republicans (which is sort of redundant now) distort and transform his story and he didn't seem to see the damage it was doing or have the inclination to counter it.

Yes, he's campaigning well with the story of the Republicans wanting to make life even easier for the wealthy but harder for the rest of us, but he needs to bring his single mother and his Kansas grandparents and the WWII service etc. and Michelle's father's illness and the sacrifice of her parents sleeping on the couch to give their kids the bedrooms, etc. to the table in every speech and every talking point.

Otherwise he will continue to be too easily defined by snide birther jokes and not so subtle race-card playing with references to how he wants to give welfare money to people for not working etc. or even more threatening to his campaign, he'll be defined by the distortions and contortions and outright lying in the rightwing Republican propaganda movie OBAMA 2016.

Not to mention the media loves an easy story they think their audience will go for like Paul Ryan is a "big idea" guy who is willing to face the tough choices, yeah sure, if they don't effect him and his fellow wealthy and only harms the rest of us.

Most of "the media" is so corporate controlled and obedient to their corporate masters it's difficult to get any story out that doesn't support corporate agendas. Most of the media also falls for a simple easy to understand story, and the rightwing Republican media experts seem to understand that better than Obama's or most Democratic politicians.

Now that it looks like Romney/Ryan will have much more money to spend on TV advertising, and has been doing that in recent weeks and will do even more in the little more than two months until the election, their story will be seen and heard by more voters more often than Obama's. It's a pretty dicey situation for those of us informed enough to know that a Romney/Ryan victory would be more disastrous than the Bush/Cheney one was. And that's saying something.