Ad hoc narratives about structural outcomes

One of my favorite themes is the way journalists create narratives based on tactics, personality, or dramatic events that purport to "explain" political outcomes that are actually the result of more systematic factors (see, e.g., here, here, and here). I've also been writing a lot recently about how pundits and partisans on both sides tend to attribute the president's failure to achieve his supporters' goals to failures of tactics or willpower.

It's clear that neither of these are new phenomena, but my focus is contemporary politics, so it was cool to see an example from the past. Barry Pump, a graduate student at the University of Washington, notes that Robert Caro's Master of the Senate includes a closely related passage about the way that failure in the Senate was interpreted by journalists and the public:

Failing to understand the realities of Senate power, press and public thought a "Leader" was a leader, and therefore blamed the Leaders -- particularly the "Majority Leader" -- for the Senate's failures. As White wrote: "A large part of the public has come to think that it is only the leaders ... who somehow seem to stand, stubbornly and without reason, against that 'action' which the White House so often demands.' And heaped atop blame was scorn. Many Washington journalists were liberals, eager for enactment of that liberal legislation which seemed so clearly desired not only by the President but by the bulk of the American people and impatient with the Majority Leaders who, despite the fact that they were leading a majority, somehow couldn't get the legislation passed. Not understanding the institutional realities, the journalists laid the Leaders' failure to personal inadequacies: incompetence, perhaps, or timidity.

This passage highlights the limitations of the American political system. The number of veto points is so large, and their effects so poorly understood, that people resort to ad hoc narratives to explain outcomes that are largely a result of the structure of the system itself. In recent years, the best example of this dynamic is the filibuster, which creates a de facto requirement of a Senate supermajority. The resulting lack of legislative action frequently gives rise to narratives about a lack of new ideas or insufficient presidential willpower, but it's really a structural problem.