Running for president in 1964, Barry Goldwater unveiled a slogan designed to neutralize media accusations of “extremism.” The campaign’s handiwork, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” may well have worked had it not been for the efforts of an anonymous genius at the DNC. Soon enough, Democratic ads began retorting with a line as zingy and memorable as Goldwater’s was earnest and dull. “In your guts, you know he’s nuts” may not have won Lyndon Johnson the election single-handedly, but it found its mark. Govern in prose, campaign in poetry.
Rhyme has long been a feature of American political advertising, a tribute to the creativity of campaign operatives and the richness of the English language. While every schoolchild has heard of the 1840 Whig anthem “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (composed by a Zanesville, Ohio, jeweler), less celebrated examples are every bit as much a part of the fabric of Americana.
When, in 1884, the Pine Tree State’s James Blaine ran against Grover Cleveland for the presidency, the former senator and House speaker was dogged by chants of “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine. Continental liar from the state of Maine.” Hoping to break the two-party logjam 108 years later, Henry R. Perot printed buttons with the witty (if disconcerting) maxim “Ross for Boss.”
Other rhyming campaign mottos have run the gamut from terse to comical to distractingly polysyllabic. Pursuing the nation’s highest office in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower ran TV spots with the instantly memorable tag “I Like Ike.” (The phrase also appeared on buttons, paper cups, cigarette packages, and other paraphernalia.) “LBJ for the USA” boosted Johnson in ’64, but, for sheer entertainment value, the slogan of the decade may well have been “Get Clean for Gene,” the 1968 adage directing hippies to sit for a haircut before going to work for Eugene McCarthy. The self-described “Reagan conservative” Patrick O’Malley probably wouldn’t have defeated Rod Blagojevich even if he had won the Republican nomination for governor of Illinois in 2002. Nevertheless, the state senator’s mouthful of a battle cry, “Rally Around O’Malley,” more than earns its place in the rhyming canon.
Reviewing failed political advertising, one sees at once the value of a bit of wordplay. Among the obstacles to a Jeb Bush presidency was the slogan “Jeb!,” which managed to be at once joyless, bewildering, and pitiable. On his way to losing 46 (of 48) states to FDR, Alf Landon trotted out the doomed appeal “Let’s Make It a Landon-Slide.” To be sure, some campaigns are star-crossed from the outset, victims of impossible circumstances or hardenings of the public mood. Still, one wonders what the 31st president was thinking when, in the midst of the Great Depression, he sought reelection under the banner “Play Safe With Hoover.”
At the heart of political rhyme-making is the recognition that Americans are a distracted people. Give us something ear-tickling, and we may respond with our attention. Attempting to turn the public against Florida’s HB 1557 earlier this year, liberals and their media allies created the catchy (if dishonest) scare-phrase “Don’t Say Gay,” a styling so irresistible that it nearly sank an eminently reasonable piece of legislation. Something similar occurred in the 1990s, when factory-farm opponents began to denounce anti-whistleblowing statutes as “Ag Gags.” Unlike in Florida, the latter gambit may have contributed to victory, as several state supreme courts eventually held that such laws are unconstitutional.
On the other side of the spectrum are bills that richly deserve opposition but have perhaps not been criticized with sufficient ingenuity. Foolishly nicknamed “Obamacare” (after a president whom voters liked), the Affordable Care Act might have been stopped in its tracks with a nifty snippet of verse (the “Block Your Doc” bill?). Oh, for a rhyme to slay an infrastructure package. Without question, liberals who wish to introduce a crippling designation into the “national conversation” have an easier time of things, abetted as they are by a compliant press. Yet conservatives, too, can capture the country’s imagination if we will only put our shoulders to the wheel. “Better Dead Than Red,” a concoction that filled innumerable Cold Warriors with grim good cheer, is but one example that proves the point.
Unlike formal campaign tag lines, grassroots protest slogans require no focus-grouping or approval from on high. As such, they are, like poetry itself, hit or miss. As I write these words (on Dobbs Friday), disappointed pro-abortion radicals are waving placards featuring the dreary couplet “Overturn Roe? Hell No!” A competing poster, “Abort the Court,” is cleverer but gives away the game by conceding that abortion is a destructive act. This is not to say, of course, that the Left is somehow deficient when it comes to the hearts-and-minds struggle of political sloganeering. “Silence is violence,” a maxim often seen at “anti-racist” events, has done as much to raise up a generation of activist zombies as any Ibram X. Kendi tome.
Indeed, the last six decades of American liberalism can hardly be explained without frequent allusions to rhyme. When, in 1987, famed race huckster Jesse Jackson led a crowd against Stanford University’s introductory humanities program, he did so while shouting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” A kindred chant made the rounds during the Vietnam era, with protesters demanding, of the 36th president, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Appropriating the mantra of New York’s “Stop the Draft Week” (1967), anti-nuclear demonstrators picketing Three Mile Island a dozen years later informed the world, “Hell, no, we won’t glow.” And let us not forget the taunt directed at Donald Trump during numerous 2016 protests: “Hands too small. Can’t build a wall.”
In a lamentable blow to American exceptionalism, foreigners, too, have long employed ideological rhymes. Our British cousins, for instance, may have invented the habit with the Guy Fawkes nursery song “Remember, Remember, the 5th of November.” More recent cases lack that poem’s grace but are nonetheless exemplars of the form. Protesting the BBC’s allegedly transphobic agenda last year, activists were seen displaying the slogan “Be more queer, be more goth. Tell the TERFs to f**k right off.” (A “TERF” is, of course, a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which is undoubtedly much harder to fit into rhyme.) Attempting to seat Peter Griffiths in the 1964 general election, Conservatives made use of the noxious motto “If you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.”
Elsewhere in the Anglosphere and beyond, political rhyming is similarly prevalent. Media coverage of this winter’s Ottawa trucker protest turned up signs reading “Let’s Go, Brandeau,” an amusing mashup of the anti-Biden jeer and the name of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In the run-up to his 2014 election, India’s Narendra Modi leaned so heavily on the slogan “Ab ki baar, Modi sarkar” (“This time, Modi government”) that the phrase went viral across the nation. Given the characteristics of their languages, the Italians and Spanish create terminal-sound repetitions with such ease that instances of the phenomenon in their domestic affairs are hardly worth cataloging. As for the rhymeless Japanese, one struggles to fathom how they conduct their politics at all.
As the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik recently opined, “Rhyme turns language into ritual.” Yet rhyme is also, to a greater extent than most literary devices, almost wholly depthless, bringing to mind John Bunyan’s giant, Maul, who “did use to spoil young Pilgrims with sophistry.” To the extent that rhyming slogans make actual arguments, their assertions tend to be crude, incomplete, and superficially plausible. (The latter is not meant as a compliment.) It isn’t just that “silence” is not “violence” in any real world. It’s that no one would think otherwise were not the words so elegantly juxtaposed.
Finally, there is the opinion of George Orwell, who cautioned in 1946 against “political language [that consists] largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Surveying the landscape, one finds slogans that are not only guilty — “War, What Is It Good For?,” “Don’t Mess With Texas,” “We’re Here, We’re Queer” — but that practically delight in the fact.
Yet, despite these manifest flaws, it is not quite true that political rhymes bring nothing to the table. In the grubbiness of campaign season, in the muck of protest, a spark of levity can loosen the clenched jaw, recalling us to the possibility of humor, fellow feeling, and joy. If the cost of that momentary transcendence is a compromised judgment, the price is probably worth paying in many cases. This is, after all, America. We weren’t that sophisticated to begin with.
Graham Hillard is managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
