President or American Idol?

Regarding upcoming elections, the one thing that I have to admit is that Democrats continue to have passion on their side. Republicans are much more pragmatic this time around. The interesting thing is that when it comes to the new voters, the people who are for the first time active participants in the process, passion counts. Pragmatism doesn’t seem to be important. Why is that?

I constantly wonder about the American Idol influence on this election. The American Idol process would ring up 40 million to even 80 million votes a week for months. Do you think that has inadvertently trained non-voters to vote? I do. And I also think it is training people as to why they vote. We could have as our next President the candidate with the best stage presence. If the songs, I mean speeches are already written for him anyway, then whose performance in delivering it is best? Who cares what the lyrics are? It’s all blah, blah, blah anyway, right? Who cares if the lyrics of the speech today in Ohio contradict the lyrics in the speech he gave last week in San Francisco? Was his performance inspiring? Did he motivate the audience? Did he command the stage?

Perhaps it isn’t fair to say that content of the speeches is not important. After all, Obama’s “change you can believe in” theme is destined to be on his Greatest Hits album. Of course, the words to that portion of his performance keep being rewritten as time goes on. In fact, the topic of that perfomance has changed so radically, that now some in the black community are coming back to him wanting to hear the older renditions of it again. This week some were very forceful in an event in criticizing the new renditions. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Randy saying, “No Dog, I just didn’t get it this time.”

Another problem with the “Change” discussion is when you really listen to the lyrics, you want to go look up the definition of the word. A case in point is when Obama was in Berlin, he told the concert crowd there that regarding our dealing with terrorism, we should work closely and in concert with our European friends to defeat it. The crowd immediately erupted in applause. But wait a minute . . . hey . . . we’re doing that exact thing right now! That is not change at all! But I admit that the President that Democrats really hate is the guy who wrote the lyrics to that tune. Obama must just sing it better.

The American Idol process was grueling. The winner was a young man who could do better at performing on stage each time with that week’s song. He didn’t have to believe in what he was singing and he didn’t have to write the song. When he won, the contest was over. Unfortunately, winning this American Idol contest marks the beginning of the effort, not the end. And this time, the new songs can have no variation with the old songs.