The Art of Political Storytelling by Seargeant Philip;

Author:Seargeant, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Figure 2 Word cloud of the most frequently used words in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign slogans.

Clinton isn’t alone in having slogan problems. By far the vast majority of recent presidential campaign slogans haven’t been particularly memorable, and probably barely registered for the voter. In 2008, John McCain ran under the slogan ‘Country First’. Four years later Mitt Romney went for ‘Believe in America’. While Bob Dole’s 1996 slogan was ‘The Better Man for a Better America’. In 1976, Gerald Ford ran with ‘He’s making us proud again’. Not only are these nearly all variations on a theme, but they’re often also remarkably similar to those used by their predecessors on both sides of the political divide. For instance, John Kerry’s 2004 slogan was ‘Let America Be America Again’, which seems like a badly phrased attempt at ‘Make America Great Again’; while George W. Bush’s slogan the same year was the Obama-esque ‘Yes, America Can’. Every now and again of course you get something a little idiosyncratic, such as Herbert Hoover’s 1928 ‘A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in Every Garage’. But these are few and far between.

On certain occasions, however, a slogan can escape the trap of being too trite, and the best of them work as succinct little narratives for the campaign as a whole. This is precisely what happened with both Vote Leave’s slogan for the Brexit referendum and Trump’s 2016 campaign statement. Writing in the Guardian, the journalist Ash Sarkar noted ‘“Take back control” was able to tell a complex story in just three words – that voters had the opportunity to reverse national decline by participating in an insurgent political moment’.11 Trump was a bit less focused, needing a full four words for his mission statement. (To be fair, the Brexit slogan began as four words as well, ‘Let’s take back control’, but when picked up by the media the first word got mislaid somewhere along the path.)

So how do these work as stories? Simply put, they place the desire for change at their heart, and foreground the need for action to accomplish that change. Change-through-action is the fundamental ingredient of any dramatic narrative. Both slogans also use imperatives (‘Take’/‘Make’), urging participation from the electorate. This is vital given that part of the strategy is to pit the common people against the idea an establishment which thinks it knows best and interferes in matters in which it shouldn’t. By encoding the idea of participation into the wording itself, the slogan thus becomes inclusive and encourages involvement. Contrast this with Hillary Clinton’s ‘Stronger Together’ or the oddly similar slogan used by the Remain campaign: ‘Stronger, Safer and Better Off’. Both of these are trying to sell the status quo, and to do so by listing a number of contrastive qualities that vaguely gesture to what might happen if we abandon what we now have. They neither invite action nor demand change. And as a result, they have very little dynamism or emotional pull.

The other crucial element shared by the Leave and Trump slogans is the evocation of a nostalgic golden age.

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