Voices
TREY
ELLIS
HUFFINGTON
07.01-08.12
AP PHOTO/JEFF ROBERSON
Whither
the Slogans
THE MALAISE IS palpable, from
both sides. Mitt Romney is clearly
a consolation prize to every single
member of the GOP except twenty
or so CEOs, while for many on the
other side the almost impossible
magic of electing a young, charismatic black man as leader of the
free world has inexorably given
way to a low-grade depression,
both fiscal and psychic. The cure
to what ails the electorate is not
more policy but policy across an
array of urgent middle-class issues all in the service of creating
and enforcing an irresistibly infectious and uplifting narrative.
Facts don’t excite voters, stories do. If one could teach us to
dream again, we’ll follow them
anywhere. That’s why somebody
needs to tell us and keep telling us
from now to November, “It’s going to get better. I see it! I see the
steps that get us back up there
in the sky from down here in this
cold, sucking mud.”
The Obama campaign’s resistance to providing a cohesive, easily digestible message has famously
plagued the administration’s first
term and plagues it still. Infrastructure investment, aid to states
Trey Ellis is
a novelist,
screenwriter,
playwright,
essayist, and
Associate
Professor
at Columbia
University