Uh...

Not content to sit on the sidelines, longtime senator and one-time presidential hopeful Orrin Hatch has penned a song for his Senate buddy John McCain in hopes of helping his White House bid.

Really, he did.

Hatch - a Utah Republican who won a platinum award for helping co-write lyrics for a song that sold more than a million records - crafted a tune called "Together Forever" for the presumptive Republican nominee.

"Forever together / America is the land we're fighting for / There's a time in history / for a hero's destiny / together forever more," says Hatch's song, co-written with composer Philip Springer, famous for the Christmas song, "Santa Baby"...

"We'll see Barack Obama's Bruce Springsteen endorsement and raise them an Orrin Hatch," a [McCain] spokesman said.

What do the kids think?

[A]ccording to Hardball, while Hatch's office says he was aiming for an upbeat song that would appeal to the youth vote, the song doesn't mimic anything found on the Top 40 - or even the next 40.

Jason Mattera, spokesman for the conservative Young America's Foundation, says the lyrics are fine but the beats and tempo are "not appealing to young people.

"Hatch's heart is in the right place, but he has the wrong decade," Mattera says, noting that the message to attract young people is that liberalism oppresses people, stifles freedom and causes "pervasive destitution. I give him credit for trying, though," Mattera adds.

What, are you surprised he didn't say "I like it, it's got a good beat, you can march to it, I give it an 86?"

Really, though, it's hard to blame McCain (who was born in 1936) or Hatch (who was born two years earlier).  Many people, myself included, think that one's love of music is heavily shaped by the music you experience as a child.  And look at was was happening in music in 1936:

George Gershwin was still alive, Cole Porter was in his prime, Rodgers and Hart were collaborating, Leadbelly published "Goodnight, Irene," Count Basie and Nat Cole began their careers, and Benny Goodman was selling a bunch of records.  It wouldn't be accurate to say, however, that Benny Goodman was tearing up the charts, because the Billboard Charts hadn't been created.  In fact, the 45 single and the 33 1/3 LP hadn't been invented yet.  

It wasn't a good year to be a Russian, as Uncle Joe Stalin was still collectivizing and purging, but it was a good year for Russian music: Prokofiev debuted Peter and the Wolf, Shastakovich wrote his Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, and Rachmaninoff wrote his Symphony No. 3.  

That's all good stuff.  But other than maybe Cole Porter, not much of that music is considered particularly hip by today's standards.  So one can partially forgive Orin Hatch and John McCain for not being very hip; they didn't grow up in time for it to be easy for them to be hip.  

For fun, though, lets look at what was happening musically in 1961, the year Barack Obama was born:

In 1961 the charts—yes, they had been around for some time by 1961—were topped by some great songs like Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" and "Spanish Harlem," the Miracles' "Shop Around," Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces," the Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman," Etta James' "At Last," Roy Orbison's "Crying" and Ray Charles' "Hit the Road, Jack."  John Coltrane released "My Favorite Things," Oliver Nelson released "The Blues and the Abstract Truth" and Dave Brubeck released "Take Five."  

In 1961 Bob Dylan traveled to NYC to meet Woody Guthrie, and the Beatles were playing in Hamburg.  

Oh, there was another significant musical event in 1961; the recordings of an almost forgotten delta bluesman by the name of Robert Johnson were released on the album King of the Delta Blues Singers.  These old scratchy recordings were a big inspiration to future rock and rollers such as The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton/Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.  

The almost forgotten recordings, by the way, had mostly been recorded in 1936.  

Did you see Brian DiPalma's The Untouchables?  There's a great scene with Sean Connery as the tough Irish cop Jim Malone challenging do-gooder Elliot Ness to recognize that to take down Al Capone, you have to fight by a different set of rules:

Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I'm saying is, what are you prepared to do?
Ness: Anything within the law.
Malone: And then what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they're not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.
Ness: I want to get Capone! I don't know how to do it.
Malone: You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?
Ness: I have sworn to capture this man with all legal powers at my disposal and I will do so.
Malone: Well, the Lord hates a coward.
[jabs Ness with his hand, and Ness shakes it]
Malone: Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?
Ness: Yes.
Malone: Good, 'cause you just took one.

To beat the Republicans, and beat them good, Democrats need to recognize that it's going to take a war on multiple fronts.  One of them is cultural.  Culturally, the Democrats are a center-hip party, while the Republicans are an extreme-unhip party. The Republicans are so extreme as to be beyond compromise. Remember, their vision of culture and entertainment is so extreme that at the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, their musical headliners included Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and Fabian.  Their revered entertainers and cultural figures include Chuck Norris, Bo Derek and Tanya Tucker.  The closest they get to having "humorists" who are actually funny is probably P.J. O'Rourke, who about 30 years ago wrote "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink."  But that was written almost 30 years ago.  Besides, O'Rourke is really more of a libertarian entertainer than a Republican or a movement conservative.

So, never mind, they don't have any humorists who are funny...intentionally.  

Many people frame our current politics as an epic war between good and evil, light and darkness, like something out of Lord of the Rings.  I don't know that I'd go that far, but it is an article of my political faith that there's no compromise with a party that attracts the reverence of both Pat Boone and Ted Nugent.

The Republicans are losing young voters.  There are many more substantive reasons young voters are trending Democratic, but it helps us that most voters see the Republicans as incredibly un-hip.  The Republicans hate gays, they love crap, and their idea of new and edgy is The Osmond family.

Thus, anything that reinforces the association of Republicans with cultural products that are tired, stale, 40 years out of date or just plain bad will help us win in November.  Therefore, I'm happy to see that somewhere some Democrats decided to bring a gun to the cultural knife fight by producing and disseminating horrifically bad YouTube videos that are so awful that they couldn't possibly be the honest product of people who really do like John McCain.  It's great to see Democrats putting out something that will cause a backlash against McCain by emphasizing that the closest the Republicans have gotten to hip in the last 50 years was probably when Richard Nixon met with late-era, peanut-butter-and-nanner-sandwiches-eating Elvis.

As an example of an apparent dirty tricks campaign by some Democrat somewhere, I present you with this:

I mean, that's not real, is it?  It is fake, right?  

Right???