Narratives? Surely you joust.

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I haven't been paying attention. What I do grasp, I forget anyway. What I notice is this 'narrative' thing seems to have latched onto a capillary of the body politick and found a home. Is narration the new touchstone?

If we're going to elect people based on their stories, which are concocted, burnished, and sold like snake oil as we go, then personality is a better description of what we vote for than issues, and Rick Davis is not only correct, but trivially so.

But if we're not to be picking presidents from 'Just So' stories, there's more to it than that.

Buried beneath this strata of trivial pursuits lie bedrock principles, differences between liberalism and conservatism. But the connection is being lost. Cut off from philosophical raisons d'etre, left with goals of little more than attaining power, we get the vacuous blather of an Obama and the label 'maverick' and 'extremist' for anyone actually rooted in something unchanging.

Obama and Biden are Democrats.

McCain and Palin are not what the big-spending, deficit-loving Republicans have become. And bless 'em for it.

By attacking the narratives, the Obamanation is ceding the philosophical battle. US Weekly, MSNBC, and Sally Quinn are finding out the narration windmill is not only unsuitable for jousting, but reveals itself as a mirage only after considerable mulepower has been wasted.