Did you hear that happy hook that added the extra spring to Barack's already jaunty step as he worked the ropeline after his victory speech on Tuesday night in St. Paul to the tune of Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising"?
While John Kerry employed Springsteen as a surrogate in 2004, I think there were some definite blunders in the way that Kerry--no pun intended--deployed the song "No Surrender" ad infinitum.
For a moment, though, as we wonder how to bridge the gap with WWCVs, imagine what could happen if the Boss and Barack hit the road for a good ole fashioned hootenanny revival. For even two weeks, right around Labor Day--a truly split-billed Springsteen/Obama tour swept through Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Scranton, Akron, culminating in a Labor Day rally at Youngstown State backed by the whole E-Street band and piped into OH and PA homes via a Perot-style ad buy...
A few thoughts on Kerry's misuse of the boss and a sample set list/template after the jump. Call it fantasy politics.
Yes
The Star Spangled Banner (yes--with Barack singing along with his hand firmly, reverently, and solemnly planted on his heart)
The Promised Land
Reason to Believe
This Land is Your Land (with a sermonette in the middle)
Lost in the Flood
My City of Ruins (another sermonette candidate)
Youngstown
The Promise
Born in the USA (blues-dirge version, like Live in NYC--with a sermonette about veterans benefits)
America the Beautiful
an unexpected cover--something with soul, maybe? Sam Cooke's
A Change is Gonna Come
The Rising
Now, as a college reporter in 2004, I covered a vintage, late-October Kerry rally in Appleton, Wisconsin. The pander was definitely on--and let me just say, John Kerry wearing Carhartt is like Dukakis in the tank or, let it be said, Barack in the bowling alley. In the former case, however, at least there was a wink and a nod.
And that song--"No Surrender"--on so, so many levels really summed up the failure of the Kerry campaign to strike any one chord in particular. Would you vote for Kerry if you were anti-war? Sure, he will fight for your views. Would you vote for Kerry if you support the war? Sure, he's, you know, a war guy, did war stuff, the US isn't fighting enough now. And he won't give up fighting on health care, will never surrender, because, war guy...
Bush-lite.
I have no doubt that John Kerry is a cool guy, that he honestly enjoys wind-surfing. But seeing him in Carhartt pumping Springsteen smacked of inauthenticity. It was different when the Boss himselfwas vouching for Kerry's cred in Madison, in Columbus, in Cleveland. Kerry doesn't have stadium-sized charisma. Springsteen does. Barack does.
It's been said about both Springsteen concerts and Obama rallies that they are public spaces that offer a sort of replacement or displacement of the churchgoing experience: the sense of energy towards a common mission and release. Of course. Just like a modern day mega-church, the Obama rally can convey a wholeness of message and mission throughout with its stagecraft and even the impeccably respectful demeanor of its volunteers.
With the "youth" (like me) at rallies, what do we have in common? Well, most of us know the speech already via youtube, and almost as many of us are probably taping the speech on our phone... to put on youtube. We know when to say Yes We Can, Turn the Page, Fired Up, Ready to Go.
How do good ol' Reagan democrat Christian white people "fellowship?" Pardon me for being elitist, but "they" sing together. And then, the pastor preaches about a topic that relates to the hymn/"chorus."
Not Who-ville style, mind you, but can you imagine a stadium full of Obamaniacs and union hall folks joining Barack and Bruce in a tone-deaf but conspicuously acapella version of the Star Spangled Banner, followed by an oration by Barack about what that means to him--perhaps, that rather than glorifying war, the flag represents the ideal of American democracy and life that wars always seem to threaten "the flag" but never quite do--it's always sitting there shining for freedom and bravery, even when we forsake our values and torture, or forsake our true bravery and cower from an enemy like Iran--rather than facing the threat. We see the flag not in but through the ramparts we watched. And we first see the flag in the hopeful still dawn of a morning after the battle--that the flag is not something we see in war but rather through it, and past it, and that the flag and what it stands for cannot be pinned to a lapel or fastened to the bumper of a truck. Rather, we are to be that star-spangled banner that represents the best of America in our neighborhoods, with our employers, with our employees, in our families, and in the world.
Perhaps because of the national anthem, we associate the flag with wartime only to fold it up whenever we allow ourselves to forget we are living in wartime. And then the soldier
Comes back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "Son, don't you understand"
I can't see the flag there.
And why don't we have jobs for veterans? Because we haven't committed to be our brother's keeper [an Iowa theme to be sure], that we have an interest and even a duty to see to our neighbor's well-being. Think of neighbors after a flood, pitching in to save a neighborhood. Isn't that at our best? Isn't that cooperation, that care the best testament for the freedom our flag stands for? And so why do we refuse to admit that our neighbors our drowning in debt, as prices rise and engulf the levees we thought we built for ourselves, the comfortable life you and your neighbor deserve because you work hard, you do work that is necessary, but at some point...
I got a little job down in Darlington
But some nights I don't go
Some nights I go to the drive-in, or some nights I stay home
I followed that dream just like those guys do up on the screen
And I drive a Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes
And when the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my dreams
...the promise was broken.
Youngstown.
Well my daddy come on the 0hio works
When he come home from world war two
Now the yards just scrap and rubble
He said, "Them big boys did what Hitler couldn't do"
These mills they built the tanks and bombs
That won this country's wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we're wondering what they were dyin' for
My City of Ruins.
Now the sweet bells of mercy
Drift through the evening trees
Young men on the corner
Like scattered leaves,
The boarded up windows,
The empty streets
While my brother's down on his knees
My city of ruins
The Rising.
Rather than using Springsteen as a surrogate or a cynical symbol, let's hope that Barack plunges into the beating heart that underlies all of Springsteen's political music, coming out of the Guthrie/Seeger tradition: an unwavering commitment to one another, to each other, and an insistence that "patriotism" ought to be viewed in this light. MLK said in the beginning of his "Dream" speech, the part that wasn't ad-libbed:
"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"
The Marxian language on display here, of course, represented the extra-racial vision of Dr. King: a commitment to economic justice that transcended region. It was to become his Poor People's Campaign, that focused on white rural Appalachian poverty just as much, if not more so, than urban "black" poverty. You may recall that that was also Bobby Kennedy's mission: to square the circle between working poor blacks and working poor whites for whom the funds are insufficient, for whom the flag does not wave, for whom the rights of man are too expensive.
Or, as Springsteen sings in "Johnny 99" (admittedly not one that spins on the VFW jukebox): I've got debts that no honest man could pay.
The challenge of the campaign will be to channel Obama's passion for local improvements on a national scale (i.e., community engagement and empowerment writ large)to the language of Rust Belt, Appalachian, and "waitress mom" lower and lower middle-class voters. Simple pie graphs, ala Perot, spelling out wage stagnation vis a vis cost of living, could help, but old solutions--like handing out "the dole"--won't work anymore as campaign rhetoric let alone policy.
The Boss's lyrics spell out, on many occasions, the central dilemma of Rust Belt politics: personalizing the "management," the men in charge of the plant, and showing their dilemma between employees, profits, and outsourcing. The Ghost of Tom Joad is full of this sort of thing (and the album includes solid arguments for compassion and reasonable resentment towards illegal immigrants who take jobs), nowhere more than the sharpest line in "Youngstown." Phrased in the second person, the last stanza:
From the Monongaleh valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalacchia
The story's always the same
Seven-hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world's changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name
The future of populism is in reintegrating employers into their surroundings. Perhaps propose a program to tax stock incentives and compensation packages of the board of directors and executive-level management, especially golden parachutes, relative to the impact of its outsourcing. Perhaps "carbon trading" could be a model, and companies could make an infrastructural "offsetting" investment upon leaving a town.
One final argument that Springsteen could make to help hold out an olive branch to WWCVs who may be pro-war but old-line Democratic:
How many billions of dollars per day has the United States government spent enticing American contracting firms overseas to Iraq to spend billions of dollars per week building schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, and creating public works projects for Iraqis along the way?
If Katrina had struck Basra (meteorological impossibility aside) more American soldiers, American money, and construction companies would have been mobilized to save it than here.
John McCain, Bruce can tell them, doesn't want to rebuild your cities or modernize your highways or protect your parkland so that gaming and recreation can continue for another hundred years--because those are pork projects. Besides, for the next hundred years there will be plenty of bridges worth building "over there." And do you really want a president, who wants to rebuild America and help you rebuild your city with your own two hands--or do you want to elect the next Emperor of Iraq, who seems to think that the economy has never been stronger?