After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.
Over here on E Street, we're proud to support Obama for President.
Bruce Springsteen
Now, I don't much care what a rock star thinks about politics, no matter how much I like his music. (I do continue to be perversely amused by the irony of Reagan using "Born in the USA" as a campaign song, but that's another issue.) While Springsteen is more well-read than most of the others that I know of - I'm thinking in particular of Paul McCartney's clueless pontifications about animal rights - I think he'd probably be the first to say being popular for something completely unrelated to politics doesn't make his opinion any more worthwhile than yours or mine.
What I do admire here is that he's not pretending to be "above politics" as so many non-political public figures do. Every campaign season seems to include at least one case of a candidate being asked to stop using a song because the singer or band whose song it is "doesn't want to get mixed up in politics." For whatever reason, they can't just say "I don't want you using my song because I disagree with you politically."* Instead, it's usually "I'm not political." I've always believed everybody is political in one way or another, and people who say they aren't usually are and just don't quite accept that they are. Worse, in my experience they tend to look down their noses at those of us who are, well, honest with ourselves about having opinions. I can at least sort of understand that mentality - even if I still don't approve of it - coming from people in academia for example. (The first and most memorable example I was ever exposed to was my spectacularly pretentious 12th grade English teacher...you don't want to get me started on her.) To hear it from people who play three-chord music for a living is just absurd.
In any case, it's good to see someone I already admired isn't afraid to share his opinion. (He was also one of the few I can recall who openly supported the Dixie Chicks when they made the mistake of not taking marching orders from Bush in 2003.) And yes, that goes for Republican rock stars as well, though there aren't very many of them that I know of. I do recall an amusing incident several years ago when Goldmine magazine ran an interview with Ted Nugent in which he made several characteristically right wing remarks. The next issue featured several letters to the editor taking Nugent to task for his views. The issue after that printed one letter to the editor from a conservative reader demanding to know why so many liberal letters had been printed bashing Nugent and not a single one in his defense.
The editor responded that he hadn't received any pro-Nugent letters.
*To his credit, Tom Scholz of Boston did do that when Mike Huckabee used "More Than a Feeling" for a campaign song earlier this year. Scholz supports Obama too, but Obama apparently is smart enough not to liven up his pep rallies with a song about a long-lost girlfriend.
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