Some readers have chidden me for not appreciating that a political campaign needs poetry as well as prose. Says one:

Of COURSE it’s socialism! but can’t we appreciate the style in which it’s presented? I don’t particularly agree with Bryan, Debs or Huey Long, but they certainly had their charms. Maybe charm is all they had, but we dasn’t underestimate charm. As those who loved Reagan know, he didn’t get elected entirely on promises of smaller government.

I yield to nobody in my love of poetry, but you know, even poetry ought to mean something. “Poetic” is not a synonym for “meaningless.” (Though I’ll grant you, looking at some of the stuff that gets published as poetry nowadays, you would never know this.)

The most I will allow here is that the definition of poetry offered by the late Auberon Waugh has much to commend it. Poetry, said Waugh, should meet at least two of the following three criteria: it should rhyme, it should scan, and it should make sense. Since Obama’s effusions neither rhyme nor scan, they are not poetry. Call me back when he’s delivered a speech in heroic couplets or terza rima.

Meanwhile, for any political candidate at all, Larry Henry points me to this all-purpose “uplift” speech. Note the date.