ABCDE OUTLOOK sunday, june 20, 2010 INSIDE Women on the verge


of a midlife crisis Pamela Paul makes the case for a new, distinctly female approach to middle age. B3


BOOK WORLD, B5-6 Deep Waters “Hairspray” auteur John Waters on his role models, from Tennessee Williams to Little Richard. B6 To Burma and back Four new dispatches tell of love and catastrophe under the military junta. B5 Children of God A faith-free father talks religion with a spiritually passionate 3-year-old. B5


“ The Obama narrative, nonstop Does the media’s endless revision of the president’s story line overshadow the real stories? B DC MD VA B


What’s a beleaguered


dad to do? If science can’t prove we matter, does that mean we don’t?” B2


President Obama reviews edits of a health-care speech in the Oval Office last fall.


PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE by Jason Horowitz S


friend Daniel. We arrived at 2:30 a.m. and crashed in a hotel. A few hours later, we woke up and coaxed each other to prepare for a day at the White House. The president was hosting a Jewish her- itage celebration, and we’d been able to get media credentials to cover the event. We were exhausted, but thrilled. The day began with security checks.


O


Then to the press room. A glimpse of former president Bill Clinton scurrying by with Vice President Biden. A press conference in the East Room with Presi- dent Obama. An impromptu interview with the White House’s mashgiach, the supervisor of the kosher kitchen prepa-


ing to me of the Obama narrative, Muse, the narrative of twists and turns driven time and again off course. Like, say, the time in January, when this paper characterized Obama’s State of


the Union address as “an effort to set the narrative on Obama’s first year,” or in April, when the Huffington Post set about “Rediscovering the Obama Narrative,” or this month, when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wondered how such a gifted storyteller could “lose control of his own narrative.” Sing to me,


Muse, of the dismay Mark Halperin registered on his blog, the Page, when he wrote “Pundit/Press Narrative Forms Against Obama.” Journalists and politicians know that voters, like everyone else, are hard-wired to understand the world through stories. Elections are contests between competing story lines, something Obama, himself an elegant writer, and his team of political image editors were keenly aware of as they crafted the protagonist as a transformative Washington outsider, whose unerringly serious, postpartisan belief in competence, bridge-building and doing the right thing would improve the nation. That sympathetic character won 53 percent of general-election voters.


But now his narrative has taken on a life of its own.


“So much of the coverage and com-


mentary has to do with the narrative, stagecraft, the political implications of what he is doing,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s special adviser for narrative, stagecraft and the political implications of what the president is doing. “When you are president of the United States, the most important thing is that you cope with the disaster.” Not, that is, the story line of the disaster. Imperfect messenger though he is, Axelrod has a point. The BP oil spill has largely been treated as the latest plot twist in the Obama epic. The plume of crude rising from the seabed is not only the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, darkening the gulf and thousands of lives and pervading the nation with a sense of helplessness, it is a metaphor for Obama’s loss of control, a revealing moment to study our pro- tagonist. Will he feel the seafarer’s pain? Will he shake with fury? Will he


weep tears into the salty sea? Sing to me,Muse, of the wrath of Washington’s Achilles. The initial government response did not provide enough dramatic juice to slake the chorus. So Obama visited the Gulf Coast again and again and again. With cameras rolling, he got into char- acter and knelt to the ground and sifted sand through his fingertips. He gri- maced on morning show interviews and pondered whose “ass to kick.” Then, on Tuesday night, in his first


Oval Office address, speaking in martial terms of a “battle,” he sought to move the story line off of him. Onward toward energy legislation! “Now,” Obama thun- dered, “is the moment for this genera- tion to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize


narrative continued on B4


Jason Horowitz writes about politics for the Style section of The Washington Post.


I asked Helen Thomas a question. Here’s my reply.


by David F. Nesenoff


n the night of May 26, I drove down to Washington from New York with my son, Adam, and his


ration. Adam and Daniel were docu- menting the events for their Jewish teen Web site, ShmoozePOINT.com. I was in- terviewing people about Israel for a fea- ture on my Web site, RabbiLIVE.com. I thought that if I could create videos


of short anecdotes about Israel — the food, archeology, history and personal experiences — they might go viral on the Internet and be a nice promo cam- paign for the country. I had started the project just a few weeks before. Even as a rabbi, I did not count on di- vine intervention. We were on the White House front


lawn when I told the teenagers that ap- proaching us was the most famous re- porter in the world — Helen Thomas, a veteran who had covered presidents from Kennedy to Obama. We stopped


rabbi continued on B3 David F. Nesenoff is a rabbi in New York. His Web site is RabbiLIVE.com.


Jessica Stern serves on the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law. This essay is adapted from her latest book, “Denial: A Memoir of Terror,” which will be published Tuesday.


A life studying terrorism, after the terror in my past


by Jessica Stern F


or the past 20 years, I have studied the causes of evil and violence. Un- til recently, I never questioned


why I was drawn to this work or why I was able to do it. Now I finally have an answer to the questions: How could a “girl” like you visit terrorist training camps in Pakistan? Weren’t you afraid? I wasn’t aware that I was afraid. After a series of traumas, one can lose the ca- pacity to feel fear appropriately. On Oct. 1, 1973, my sister and I biked home from ballet class. We were doing our homework in our living room in Concord, Mass., when a man entered the house. For an hour, this rapist had a gun trained on my sister and me while he attacked us. She was 14, and I was a year older. Both my sister and I went on to lead relatively happy and productive lives.


My sister is a successful marketing ex- ecutive, an opera singer and an actress. She is married and has two children. She feels great joy in her family and in her music, and no one would describe her as a victim. I similarly take enor- mous pleasure from my family and my work.


And yet, from adolescence on, I no- ticed changes that grew worse over time. With each passing year, I seemed to feel less and less — less pain, but also less joy. As a child, I wanted to be a writ- er, but bad grades in classes that re- quired writing persuaded me to give up. I was more comfortable studying un- emotional subjects. I majored in chem- istry, in part because it came more easi- ly to me, and in part because I liked that the answers were either right or wrong, unlike in real life, where emotional va- lences count.


terror continued on B4


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