Theme Party
For most
of this century, it's been a routine British sneer that Americans have no sense
of irony. Bob Dole's poll numbers may finally be proving the Brits right. Dole
has run the most ironic, postmodern presidential campaign ever seen--starting
with his campaign theme song, the only conceivable purpose of which is to serve
as an ironic negation of everything campaign themes are meant to do. "" is a
takeoff on the '60s hit "I'm a Soul Man," and its most immediate quality is
that it's so un-Dole. It's a parodic campaign song: Dole obviously has never
heard of it, any more than he's heard of Tupac Shakur or those other gangsta
rappers his advisers periodically call on him to denounce. Then again,
considering that 98 percent of all pop songs are gender-neutral (though Pat
Buchanan toyed with "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun"), the number seems to have
been especially picked for the blithe insouciance it shows toward the Dole
campaign's "gender gap." What do they do for a second chorus? "I'm a Dole
Chick"? More ironic is that the song is an exquisite musicalization of the
candidate's most frequently cited defect: his campaign's lack of any central
theme. "Dole Man" isn't about anything at all. You can't blame Dole for having
trouble staying "on message" when the only message of his song is that you
should stand around twitching:
I'm a
Dole Man,Na-na-na-na, na-na.I'm a Dole Man,Na-na, na-na .(Repeat until
fade)
Sam &
Dave sang the song back in the '60s, and Sam gave the campaign permission to
use it. I forget how Dole voted on the 1976 revisions to Title 17 of the U.S.
Code, but it clearly never registered with him that, in pop songs, copyright
belongs to the copyright holder--in this case the recording company--not to the
recording artists. One of the song's writers objected to "Dole Man," the
recording company backed him up, and Sam's permission proved to be irrelevant.
So much for Dole's line that though he may not have a lot of fancy words, he's
a legislator and knows how things work.
Compare all that with Clinton in '92, who went on the stump
to a that suited him perfectly. Yes, that's a cruel thing to say about anybody,
but the point is that it was a plausible soundtrack to his campaign:
Don't
stopThinking about tomorrow,Don't stopIt'll soon be here.
This
quatrain distills brilliantly both the vapidity and ruthless single-mindedness
of the Clinton administration. We can't say we weren't warned.
For a campaign song that's pithy you have to go back to
1931 and the satirical musical Of Thee I Sing , in which John P.
Wintergreen campaigns for the White House with a powerful slogan ("A Vote for
Wintergreen Is a Vote for Wintergreen") and a (by the Gershwins) of just four
lines:
Wintergreen for president!Wintergreen for president!He's the man the people
choose,Loves the Irish and the Jews.
Unfortunately, the strategy wasn't so successful the second time around. In the
sequel, Let 'Em Eat Cake (1933), John P. Wintergreen runs for
re-election and is defeated by John P. Tweedledee, with his :
He's the man the
country seeks!Loves the Turks and the Greeks!
Ira Gershwin was much better at spoof campaign songs than
the real thing. In the '50s, he reworked "It Ain't Necessarily So" for Adlai
Stevenson (and included the first sung reference to a vice-presidential
candidate: "L'il Nixon was small, but oh, my/His office expenses were high") as
well as "Love Is Sweeping the Country" (also from Of Thee I Sing ):
Adlai's
sweeping the country!He will be the next prez,We'll be leaningOn words with
meaning,For he means every word he says.
It's funny
how hard it is to find anything to sing about. Most presidential elections in
the republic's history have had specially commissioned themes: "Teddy, Come
Back," "Wilson--That's All," "Franklin D. Roosevelt's Back Again," "Nixon's the
One." But it wouldn't have made any difference if they'd been "Wilson's the
One," Theodore Roosevelt's Back Again," "Franklin--That's All," and "Nixon,
Come Back."
As if to concede the John P. Wintergreen/John
P. Tweedledee interchangeability, most campaigns eventually settled for an
"INSERT NAME OF CANDIDATE HERE" approach, shoehorning their man into the
handiest existing song. In 1988, I asked Sammy Cahn if he'd been pressed into
service. "Funny you should mention that," he said, "but I got a call from some
friends in Boston who are backing a fellow called Dukakis. So I wrote 'My Kind
of Guy (Dukakis Is).' "
"A bit tricky to rhyme,
'Dukakis is'?"
"Sure,"
said Sammy, "but there's always a way around. When Kennedy asked me if he could
use ',' I realized his name didn't fit any part of the tune. Where can you put
it?
"Just
what makes the little old ant Think he'll move a rubber-tree plant?Ev'ryone
knows an antCan't Move a rubber-tree plant,But he's got high hopes.
"So, instead of that, I
spelled it out:
"K-E-double
N-E-D-YJack's the nation's favorite guy,Ev'ryone wants to back Jack.JackJack is
on the right track,And he's got high hopes."
When I subsequently encountered Dukakis, it seemed highly
unlikely that he could be Cahn's (or many other folks') kind of guy--and, of
course, he wasn't particularly. Cahn was simply plying his trade. "I'm a
songwriter and I play straight down the middle. Sinatra asked me to do a lyric
for Spiro Agnew, so I did." Amazingly, the guy who wrote "Call Me
Irresponsible" and "All the Way" insisted that the song he wrote to mark Ed
Meese's first year as Attorney General was one of his best lyrics ever.
Perhaps one day the Dick
Morrises and Ed Rollinses will find it easier to pick candidates who already
have the names of popular songs. Watching the shamelessly bogus populist Lamar
( Lamar! ) Alexander "walking across New Hampshire," accompanied by
campaign workers in immaculately pressed plaid shirts they'd clearly changed
into in the men's room at Manchester airport, you began to wonder if the
candidate himself wasn't just Lamar Schmoe who'd changed his name just so he
could use "Alexander's Ragtime Band" as his theme song.
Should all else fail, the
candidate can always resort to the theme from , which, on the basis of no
scientific evidence, is credited with mystical powers to transform any flagging
campaign. Bob Dole has been using it in his post-"Dole Man" phase. In 1980,
facing similar difficulties, Ted Kennedy switched from Aaron Copland's "Fanfare
for the Common Man" (too high-toned) to "Gonna Fly Now," the theme from
Rocky (Ted as the plucky little underdog). As we all know, he swept to a
fantastic victory that November.
