Hail to the Chief And His Musical Tastes, Too

By Broadside Style Columnist Andy Minor

Over the past two weeks, I've spent a fair amount of time watching the Democratic and Republican National conventions. I'm sure many of you have as well, and that you're all doing your best to stay as informed as possible. But for my article this week, I want to shed some light on both Obama and McCain's campaigns; a part that wasn't necessarily highlighted during either convention: their official campaign songs.

As far as my research has taken me, John McCain's official campaign song was supposed to be “Our Country” by John [Cougar] Mellencamp. Mellencamp asked McCain to stop using the song, so McCain sought refuge within ABBA's “Take a Chance on Me.” Both choices, to me, are horrible.
Mellencamp's ditty has a decent message, but at the same time I've heard it during every commercial break for every baseball game I've watched since 2003, when the song became the official song for Chevrolet. I also happen to think that it’s a boring song due to its monotonous tempo and faux-country style.

The ABBA song's title makes enough sense, but catchy, upbeat, intellectually void disco tracks are hardly what I hear in my head when I think of the economy or the war on terror. Plus, ABBA is Swedish, and you would think whoever was in charge of selecting this song would at least pick an American musical group.

Barack Obama seems to be going the Motown route, throwing his support behind Stevie Wonder with “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and Ben Harper's “Better Way.” The Harper tune makes a lot of sense, but when I listen to it I hear tons of sitar and tabla playing; not exactly the instruments the average American enjoys listening to since they are both native to the Indian Subcontinent. It has a great message and great lyrics, but I think a campaign song should relate a candidate to his voters, not distance them for the sake of a message.

The Stevie Wonder tune isn't much a decent selection either, as applying any sort of political theme to it is a stretch of interpretation. The “official” Obama song I couldn't find anywhere on the internet, as it is currently being composed by Joss Stone. I'll judge it when it comes out, but I do appreciate this return to the idea of artists writing songs specifically about the candidates they support.

As much as I criticize our present candidates on their songs, in the grand scheme of things their selections aren't that terrible. I'd have to hand the worst overall to the 1972 campaign of George McGovern, who picked Paul Simon's “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to lead him to the White House. While the message works, the tempo and instrumentation do not. It’s roughly equivalent to picking “The Sound of Silence” or “The Boxer” as your campaign song: great song, but not for American politics. Honorable mention goes to “Rockabye, Baby,” used for the 1836 Van Buren campaign. I don't think a lullaby could get me ready to vote.

Best overall I'm going to go ahead and hand to Bob Dole who, in 1996, adapted the Blues Brothers hit “Soul Man” and morphed it into “Dole Man.” Dole was forced to pull the song for copyright reasons, but I still say that adapting a classic song to fit your campaign is much better than finding one that fits it already. Honorable mention goes to “Get on a Raft with Taft” from William Howard Taft's 1908 campaign. I'm not exactly sure if I would get on a raft with our heaviest president to date, but I sure do like the name of that song.

Another thing I've noticed while looking at the music that rocked the campaigns of the past was that the Republican Party has a history of getting their songs taken away by the artists who performed them. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and John Mellencamp are all on the list of artists who have had to force the Republican candidates—in 1984, 2000 and 2008 respectively—to stop using their songs. The Democratic Party on the other hand, despite their access to any song recorded by any rock artist save Ted Nugent, is hardly in the business of picking decent campaign songs to relate to their voters.

In 2000, Al Gore had “You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, a rather trashy song about some sort of mysterious “devil woman.” And we can all thank God Hillary Clinton didn't win the nomination, because her song would have been “You and I” by Celine Dion, whose malignant mezzo-soprano would have haunted me in my sleep until the elections finished in November. That's easily enough to make us all long for the days of 1804's “Huzzah for Madison, Huzzah.” Though in a way, I wish we were back there already, when we wrote songs about our candidates and our candidates didn't try to apply themselves to songs.