MarketingWonk pointed to a new web site for Dean supporters today: Songs For Dean.

Political campaigns have long used music to motivate and energize their workers and supporters. As the result of endless repetition at campaign events, advertising and news coverage, some adopted campaign songs are more recognized for their political connotations than their original success.

The War Room, the successful documentary about the ‘92 Clinton campaign for President, emphasized the influence of Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow) - especially in setting the stage at the Democratic Convention in New York and at the Inauguration in Washington.

Farther back in time, Ronald Reagan used Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” as a 1984 campaign theme. Walter Mondale tried to counterattack, and hard, with a brutal ad juxtaposing pictures of children with missles launching, set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Teach your Children.”

Tim Robbins mined this vein of thought in his “mockumentary” about the political campaign of Bob Roberts, a right-wing guitar-playing candidate for the Senate.

Vincent Camby of the NYT nails the character: He’s young, healthy and sincere. More important, he appropriates gestures and language associated with 1960’s protest movements and uses them in the cause of his own brand of 1990’s right-wing rabble-rousing. He calls himself a “rebel conservative.”

One of my favourite singers, Billy Bragg, made similar comments about the Labour Party’s choice of song in 2001: it was “bland” and evoked “watered-down Conservatism”. He said: “I think so much of New Labour is about presentation rather than detail. “They are hoping we won’t listen to the verse and just hear the chorus - it’s style over content.”

Camby’s comment about appropriating the cultural indicators of the 60’s can
be applied to a number of candidates over the past thirty years, Dean included. On Songs for Dean, you can find titles like “I Want My Country Back,” “Battle Hymn of the Blog,” “Take Me Out To the Blog Game,” and, interestingly, “With Dean We’re Marching On” - which is sung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. (warning: this wav is a real church school organ rendition)

Some more historic ditties can be found on Presidential Campaign Songs 1789 - 1996 (with some sound clips). Here’s a snappy LAT article on the subject, with choice selections from he 2000 election.