, Columnist
Why It Pays to Tell Americans Who They Are
Clinton should borrow Obama's signature rhetorical strategy.
"We are better than that."
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
When President Barack Obama is trying to persuade Americans not to do something, he has a go-to line: “That’s not who we are.” Whether the issue involves discrimination, immigration, torture, criminal violence or health care, he invokes the nation’s very identity. And he likes to follow it by adding, “We are better than that.”
In this way, throughout his political career, Obama has embraced the American tradition of rugged individualism, while arguing that it has always been bound by “an enduring sense that we are in this together.” America, he says, is “sustained by the idea that I am my brother’s keeper and I am my sister’s keeper.”