Tangent: politics, narrative, and statistics

I've previously talked about how the most important thing to winning an argument is not having the facts on your side, but having a compelling narrative that makes "the facts" make sense to the audience. We seem to be seeing that develop even more in national politics of late:
From Salon.com:
"It is striking how Obama's rhetoric differs from standard political oratory by being a statistic-free zone. In the closing days in Iowa, Obama might talk for 40 minutes in a tiny town like Perry while citing only one or two numbers. In contrast, Clinton on the stump is a human pocket calculator, constantly telling voters how much purchasing power they have lost under Bush (about $1,000) and how many jobs were created under Bill Clinton (lots!). Even Edwards spices his talks with a burst of numbers about the extent of poverty in America." (Shapiro, W. Barack Obama's breakthrough victory. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/04/iowa_dems/)

Dan Schorr (Schorr, D. The politics of truth and celebrity. All Things Considered, Jan. 2, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17790148) connects this phenomenon to "celebrity worship"; which, though I think it does provide some insight, unduly temporizes the phenomenon with a kind of presentism that probably wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. (i.e., while the trope that "America is celebrity obsessed, to the point of neglecting important issues" is everywhere today, I think the phenomenon of being more taken with the narrative than the data predates our collective obsession with Britney.)