John McCain and Barack Obama were going at each other this week and the loser was: Hillary Clinton. It’s not the pledged delegate math, it’s not the endorsements, no it’s the narrative that shows that Hillary is not competing anymore. When you’re not part of the narrative, you’re the tree that fell in the forest that no one heard falling.

McCain and Obama clashed over the GI Bill, but both of course weren’t too concerned with that bill; every narrative line needs a vehicle. Obama kicked off the ball by criticizing McCain’s opposition to the bill. Show ▼

The main theme that Obama was using is the ‘McCain is a Bush replica’ meme. He mentions ‘the president’ twice in the space of just a couple of sentences. Why Obama does this is obvious. McCain keeps this narrative line credible though by doing fundraisers with Bush. The fact is that McCain didn’t appear with Bush in two months, but I am convinced that people’s perception would place this interval much shorter. I believe perception, and not so much reality, would make fertile ground for this narrative line.

The second theme in Obama’s quote is partisanship. He presents himself as the bi-partisan candidate, so he wants to frame McCain as a partisan player. The mention of ‘posturing’ comes close to a character assesment but it is just a minor theme here, so I’ll ignore it.

McCain then responded. Show ▼

There is a lot more to McCain’s response than the unsurprising touting of his military credentials and Obama’s lack of these. There is the mention that Obama would need to do some learning according to McCain — a theme we’ve heard more these days. But the most interesting piece is that McCain’s campaign clearly has taken notice of Obama’s habbit of questioning his opponent’s character and how assertive they deal with this.

As I said, Obama’s ‘political posturing’ claim is a minor one but the McCain campaign picked it out and enlarged it to bigger proportions by branding it ‘impugning the motives of his opponent’. It seems that the McCain campaign is actively using Obama’s practise of assessing his opponent’s character, using it against him, even magnifying it where necessary. And then of course McCain, ironically, goes on to asses his opponent’s character himself, saying Obama is ‘exploiting a thoughtful difference of opinion to advance his own ambitions’. McCain takes another leaf out of Obama’s book by making the Democratic senator’s behaviour part of a pattern with ‘as he always does’.

Obama comes back swinging. Show ▼

One hopes that the candidates will care just as much about veterans when they make it to the White House, but that won’t be the case; the veterans are just a vehicle here for the narrative. Obama uses his trademark ‘yet another lengthy personal, political attack’ claim again. Let’s hope that the candidates are going to try some new narrative lines, otherwise this is going to be a campaign with very few dimensions…

Additions to Obama’s Narrative Chart

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Additions to McCain’s Narrative Chart

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