Conservative commentator Peggy Noonan made two mistakes when she was caught on MSNBC riffing on John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin: “The most qualified? No! I think they went for this, excuse me, bull—-t about narratives.” Noonan’s first mistake was not realising her mic was on. Her second had nothing to do with taste and everything to do with a misimpression of what resonates with voters. In fact, it was the man who has the most to lose from Palin’s appeal who got it right. Palin, said Barack Obama, “is a great story.”

Note the use of “is” rather than “has.” A candidate’s personal story, whether captured in snapshots (Jack Kennedy, PT boat captain; Teddy Roosevelt, Rough Rider) or in a biography spanning decades (Bill Clinton, The Man From Hope,), and whether fully accurate or not, comes to define him or her. Narratives have been used to attract voters at least since Lincoln’s campaign managers cast him as the rugged rail-splitter from the country’s frontier, not the prosperous railroad lawyer and sophisticated writer he was, notes historian Michael Beschloss: voters are drawn to someone they can relate to, and the way to make that happen is by offering them stories. (The human brain is wired so that we can follow a chain of events that have people doing things in chronological order more easily than we can follow abstractions.) But the power of the narrative has grown as party identification has weakened — putting more voters in play — and as the culture has changed. Television has made voters expect to, and think they can, “see into people’s souls to take their measure,” says Beschloss. To do that, “they need clues,” and there are few clues so potent as the challenges a person has faced and how he or she has met them. “The feeling that we need to know who these people are has become so enormous that a good part of Sarah Palin’s appeal is her life history, the choices she made, things that let voters form a bond with her,” says Beschloss. “It was almost as important in the selection of Joe Biden, with his story of pulling himself up by the bootstraps from a tough childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

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