Don't worry about the oil; we'll write that out of the narrative

Sing 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 commentary 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 protagonist. 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.