Clinton’s campaign anthem describes a character nothing like her.
Yahoo News informs us that Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” the tune adopted as the campaign theme for Hillary Clinton, “inspires hatred from some outsiders, but some Clinton campaign staffers insist they’ve grown to love it.”
“‘Fight Song’ is an anthem. ‘Fight Song’ is a way of f***ing life,” one staffer is quoted as saying. “It un-ironically brings me joy.”
The question of whether the song is an insufferable earworm obscures the fact that it doesn’t fit Clinton at all. Its lyrics describe a previously silenced underdog who’s finally willing to stand alone, no matter how unpopular her stand might be. None of this even remotely applies to the Democratic nominee.
“Like a small boat on the ocean, sending big waves into motion,” the song begins. Put aside the fact that small boats do not actually generate big waves, at least on the scale of the ocean. Clinton’s campaign cannot claim that she is the most prepared, experienced candidate in American history and a scrappy underdog fighting the odds. This is a woman who has spent more than two decades at the center of the American political system. She’s not a rickety fishing trawler attempting to traverse the Atlantic in a storm; she’s a luxury-cruise ship speeding along unencumbered.
“I might only have one match; but I can make an explosion,” Platten sings later in the same verse. It is tempting to see these lines as a metaphor for Clinton’s support of regime change in Libya, but again the lyrics don’t make much literal sense: Matches, by themselves, don’t cause explosions; those require fuel and air. The song’s general theme is clear, though: that the singer is not big and powerful, but she will have a big and powerful impact. Hillary Clinton, of course, is the definition of big and powerful in American politics: the near-universal name ID, the ex-president husband, the enormous fundraising network, and of course the personal foundation controlling hundreds of millions of dollars donated by powerful benefactors around the world. She’s got more matches than she can count and plenty of TNT.
#related#“All those things I didn’t say, wrecking balls inside my brain; I will scream them loud tonight, can you hear my voice this time?” Platten asks later. Maybe this works if you picture it being sung by a hawkish secretary of state, thwarted in her efforts to intervene in Syria by an obstinate president who refuses to enforce his own red lines. But again, Clinton is the precise opposite of a person who has been ignored and shunted aside. She’s had the loudest voice in the country for as long as anyone can remember.
It’s not surprising that no one at the Democratic convention seemed particularly troubled by any of this — partisan convention-goers aren’t noted for their powers of self-awareness. But the irony of an underdog’s rallying cry being sung in support of a woman more privileged, wealthy, famous, and powerful than almost anyone else is no less striking for having gone unstated in Philadelphia: Of course, no one’s going to keep her down. She was never down to begin with!
— Jim Geraghty is National Review’s senior political correspondent.