We all, always, are figuring out the stories the world is telling us.

Lawyers understand better than most that putting together a story in one’s mind is the most common everyday act we all engage in. People speak of “proof” and “facts” as if they’re certainties, but lawyers know that “proof” is merely evidence that can only be understood in light of other evidence and that “facts” are not hard and fast things inferred from the evidence. As I tell my students, “We never have God’s videotape.”

But we need to understand the evidence we confront as hard and fast enough to support the decisions we always have to make, whether we’re jurors or just ordinary people making the decisions ordinary people make all the time. And we’re not bad at it; we come to the best story we can given the facts and move forward. The process may almost be like natural selection: our decisions about how to interpret the evidence we have are tested by the consequences those decisions entail, and so our interpretations (we hope) get better as we see our decisions succeed and fail.

In short, the world is a story just like a news story, a movie, or a novel is. And those of us who engage in storytelling know more than a few things about how to put together the evidence to sway our audience in the way we want our audience to be swayed. I wrote the week before last about one pattern humans find compelling.

There are many, many more effective methods of telling stories. Tell the story from the point of view of the person with whom you want your audience to identify. Move what you emphasize to the front of your story, to the front of your paragraphs, and to the front of your sentences. Spend more time on what you want to emphasize. Stay credible. Take what you want to de-emphasize and bury it in the middle of your story, in the middle of a paragraph, and in the middle of a sentence. Better yet, surround that “bad” evidence by good evidence at the beginning and ends of those paragraphs and sentences. Do mention the “bad” facts (if you don’t, some adversary will, which will considerably damage your credibility), but mention them as briefly as possible.

I could go on, but that’s enough for today.

One last thing: how do you decide about the evidence regarding Sarah Palin?

Is she a true agent of change? She’s taken on the establishment in traditionally corrupt Alaska to become one of our ruling party’s rising stars and walks the walk when the real world we all struggle with confronts her. She ran for governor and won against the former Senator who had appointed his own daughter to succeed him in the Senate and is more popular with her constituents than any other governor is among his or hers. When she is faced by the kind of unanticipated smack in the face Reality often doles out — as she has been by her daughter’s pregnancy, a private matter that anyone could face — she shows that she stands by her principles. She opposed the “Bridge to Nowhere,” the project which is synonymous with business as usual in Washington, and she is a political enemy of the corrupt Senator from her own party, Ted Stevens. In short, John McCain showed he really is a true maverick in choosing her.

Or is she this year’s Thomas Eagleton and Geraldine Ferraro rolled into one? She’s a charismatic Christian creationist who would outlaw abortion even in cases of rape and incest. She was a member of a political party that stands for the secession of Alaska, the abolition of all property taxes, and the privatization and exploitation to the hilt of all public lands within the new country. She was elected governor of a state so unpopulated she only needed 115,000 votes to win, and so, while she may be popular there, her popularity hardly shows she is representative of “real” Americans. How could it? She has been governor of that state for less than two years. She believes in abstinence-only education, yet the ineffectiveness of that policy in fighting teen pregnancies is highlighted by her own 17 year old daughter’s pregnancy. She supported the “bridge to nowhere” before she opposed it. She didn’t “take on” the corrupt Ted Stevens, as Lindsey Graham claimed, but, rather, led a major fundraising effort for him. She’s even under investigation for pressuring Alaska’s commissioner of public works to fire the state trooper who was engaged in an acrimonious custody battle with her sister. In short, she is Exhibit A for the defects in John McCain’s decision-making and judgment.

Addendum: from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: “Sarah Palin was not registered as a member of the Alaska Independence Party, though TPM Muckraker found that her husband was.“