Why Are All the Candidates Courting John Mellencamp?

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Why Are All the Candidates Courting John Mellencamp?

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on May 13, 2008

In years to come they will remember it as The Battle for John “Cougar” Mellencamp. For some while now, the US presidential candidates have been tustling over the affections of the 56-year-old singer-songwriter, Indiana native and author of compositions such as Hurts So Good and R.O.C.K in the U.S.A. John McCain took to playing his 2006 hit Our Country at campaign rallies, while Hillary Clinton chose Small Town (”But I’ve seen it all in a small town/ Had myself a ball in a small town”). Mellencamp himself has performed at rallies for both Obama and Clinton. But who does Mellencamp actually support?

And why is he so valuable to presidential hopefuls?

Mellencamp is a fully fledged Democrat - in 2004’s election, he supported John Edwards, and Small Town became the official theme of Edwards’ campaign. Not surprisingly, therefore, he has requested that Republican McCain refrain from playing his songs at rallies (and really, McCain’s choice was always a curious one - folded up in Our Country’s robust patriotism is some strikingly liberal sentiment: “That poverty could be/ Just another ugly thing/ And bigotry would be/ Seen only as obscene/ And the ones that run this land/ Help the poor and common man.” (Though we should note that Ronald Reagan made a similar error in 1984 when he commandeered Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA).

From these shores, Mellencamp might seem an unlikely focus for such a tug-of-love, but his songs embody the very voting group that the candidates are now scrapping over: blue-collar, white, male. It’s a similar territory to that occupied by Springsteen, who has perhaps now been venerated into elitism; Mellencamp’s prize is precisely a lack of elitism, his songs populated by average joes such as those who appear in Jack and Diane, a little ditty about “two American kids doing the best they can”.

The eventual Democratic nominee in search of the perfect Mellencamp tune would do well to choose Pink Houses, a tale of a run-down, dream-faded America, of the black man with “an interstate runnin’ through his front yard”, of “the simple man” who “pays for the thrills, the bills and the pills that kill”, and the rock’n'roll fan who got told when he was younger, “‘Boy, you’re gonna be president’/ But just like everything else, those old crazy dreams/ Just kinda came and went.” Come November, few songs would make for a finer battle cry.
By Guardian Unlimited © Copyright Guardian Newspapers 2008

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