Ron Suskind's Confidence Men recounts a moment when Obama pounds the walls of the White House crying, "What's happened to my narrative?"

He should have called me. I'd have told him to drop his bipartisan, "last reasonable man in Washington" posture right after the debt-ceiling fiasco and leave town on the equivalent of Harry Truman's 1948 whistle-stop tour against the "do-nothing Congress," thundering the following, in state after state:

"I told you in 2008 that 'There's no blue America and no red America, but events since then have proved that there is a rich America that's getting richer and a poor and working America that's getting poorer. And I want you to send me a Congress that will help us bring back the United States of America!"

Obama could have said a bit about the conditions and representation of whatever congressional district he was visiting. And it would have worked. There's no justification for the Beltway aversion to presidential "storytelling." The enduring question of Obama's presidency will be one his advisers and apologists haven't posed:

Why didn't the man who roused Americans in 2008 with a credible narrative of their discontents and a sketch of ways to address them come back to them again when it mattered? Wouldn't that have been more effective that staying in Washington's political vise and watching his accomplishments and even his compromises whittled down by the likes of Mitch McConnell?

Beltway pundits, no less than cynics on the left, believe that a "narrative" is only a plausible fairy tale. But poetry holds power in history, for better or worse, and the would-be history maker with the best poetry often wins.

Mario Cuomo distinguished the "poetry of campaigning" from "the prose of governing," but every political system rests on "constitutive fictions" that are partly fairy tales. Obama should have stayed with his civic-republican one, because a lot gets done under its spell, It's part of governing itself, especially when it's pitted well against ideologues with compelling but false narratives of their own.

It's fashionable in some academic quarters, for reasons rather different than those of Washington pundits, to debunk the value of narratives on the grounds that they're reductive and destructive of richer varieties of human understanding. True enough. But no paradigm is perfect, and it seems to me that in human "history," for better or worse, those with the best narratives flourish, while those who lack them become demoralized: Their rites of passage collapse; the resiliency of their social interactions decays, and -- sure enough -- they "can't get anything done."

Lincoln understood both sides of this problem -- the inscrutability of history, which communal narratives inevitably over-simplify, and, on the other hand, the indispensability of narratives, whether in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin or in the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

And when Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and cried out a line from the latter -- "Mine eyes have seen the glo-o-o-r-r-y, of the coming to the Lord!" -- he understood that poetry is power. Often enough, the side with the best poetry wins, not necessarily because the poetry has charmed its opponents but because it gives strength and focus to those who've taken it to heart.

Is that dangerous? Yes. So are horses, which men "break" and ride. So is human dignity that asserts itself against perceived constraints and affronts.