“Just Play the Damn Song!”

I’m bringing my very first Stephen King novel in on final approach, and I gotta say, this baby handles like a dream. I mean, it’s almost like the damn thing flew itself the whole way and all I had to do was hit “go” before settling back for the ride.

Mr. King is a very different kind of writer than I could ever be. I’ve read writers like him, but he’s one of the best at what it is that he, and they, do with the written word. He delivers the story without letting his writing get in the way. In fact, he’s so transparent a writer, it’s hard to really critique him as a writer. It’s almost like he’s a plot delivery system. A really efficient plot delivery system.

Maybe it’s the decades of delivering wonderfully crafted and brilliantly paced plots, or maybe it’s just how the man thinks as he’s tapping away on his keyboard, but whatever his secret is, when you finish a chapter, you know exactly what he wants you to know, feel exactly what he wants you to feel, and can’t – for the life of you – recall one single phrase turned within the confines of any of it. It’s like you just absorb the chapter as activity that has occurred in the world he’s created for you. He’s stayed out of it all. For me, it’s been a revelation.

I’m not like that as a writer. My inner Edgar Allen Poe feels the need to get right in there and be part of the whole experience. Maybe it’s ego, or maybe it’s the showman in me – flicking the lights on and off, here and there, now and then, to make sure you never forget that I’m the one telling you this story that we’re slogging through together. When I was still leading bands through shows as a frontman, singer, Master-of-Ceremonies in the rock nightclubs of my youth, I’d invariably get hit with the “just play the damn song” remark at some point during the show – usually by someone on stage with me, who’d finally had their fill of my “salesmanship” as I worked every song to showcase my unique version of brilliance for the asses that had collected in the seats before us.

Of course, I never did learn to “just play the damn song”, and that natural tendency to get the way of a good story has tagged along with me into this new passion for the art of prose. To be blunt about it, I just can’t let the plot, or the idea, be the star of the show. Like Dean Koontz, and the HP Lovecrafts of old, I’m an inefficient plot delivery system, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Thank God that there are people who exist that enjoy that kind of superfilous distraction. If not, Dean, HP, and I would be out of luck, with an endless chorus of “just play the damn song” thundering through our heads, as we helplessly indulge our egos with clever phraseology and innovative lyrical turnarounds to an audience of no one at all, save the hapless victims whose only sin is to love us too much to abandon us.

So, what is all of this about? Where is all of this going?

Last night, Barack Obama nailed two more primary wins, and did so in an increasingly common double-digit fashion, as Hillary Clinton continues to hold out hope that Ohio and Texas will somehow pull the rabbit she needs out of her ass, and save her the humiliation of returning to her Senate seat, never to be allowed to run for the presidency again. I’m sure she’s frantically searching through the game tapes for the secret that lies in plain sight – somewhere among the hours of platform and policy bullets that both have presented since it all started heading south for her – that will give her that “ah ha” moment that’s been evading her and the pros she’s gathered around her, to give them the strategy they need to derail the Junior Senator from Illinois, and his race to become this season’s moment of political history.

I think that if she and the Clinton Machine haven’t seen it yet, they’ll never see it. In fact, if the pundits around the country can’t see it, then it just proves how wonderfully effective it really is, and that Barack Obama really does have a good chance to be the first African-American president of the United States.

It’s very simple, and it’s exactly the opposite of what makes Stephen King a great writer of well developed and efficiently paced plots. Barack Obama never “just plays the damn song”, and from the looks of it, he never will.

Barack is a performer. He’s not just a performer, he’s a great salesman. He’s not just a great salesman, he’s a performer of sales, and in politics, that is brilliantly rare. Especially in the realm of presidential politics.

Okay, it’s not like we haven’t had salesmen in the Oval Office before. In fact, it’s not like each guy we’ve ever invited to live in the White House has been anything but a salesman, but there’s a difference between a salesman who presents a product, and a salesman who inspires you to want to believe in the product that he’s chosen to represent – and solely because it’s a product that HE has decided to represent. As if no competing product could ever really compete unless this specific salesman chose to represent it. What I’m talking about is a salesman who is much larger than the product itself, and we’ve had very few presidents like this.

Presidents are salesmen. Plain and simple. It’s a sales job and has always been a sales job. Policy is crafted by professional crafters of policy. Scores of them. Bent over legal texts and crunching numbers, these wonks work to “just play the damn song”, and deliver the product to the lead sales team. That sales team is headed up by the president himself (someday herself), whose job it is to pitch it to the customers as they sit in their loungers and sofas during prime time sales presentation events. The president, for most people, IS the sales effort, and 90% of what the American consumer buys from this effort hinges on how likeable, and believable, that lead salesman is. In short, if the president can’t make the sale, the presidency is irrelevant from the beginning, regardless of the ideas, the policies, or the strength and experience of the staff gathered around it.

When Franklin Roosevelt declared that the folks gathered before him had nothing to fear but fear itself, people believed him, and they took those first steps in the long journey back to believing in themselves as members of a society that could be greater than the circumstances presented to them. When John Kennedy asked young Americans to “ask now what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, they were convinced to leave a world of self, and become part of a growing world of reaching out to others to find that sense of fulfillment that young people seem to need in their lives.

Abraham Lincoln defined our nation, as a nation, following years of bitter division and bloodshed, born out of the collective view held by most that we were an association of states, united in common purpose and common benefit, as opposed to a nation of states, united as one America, and he did so by the sheer power of his ability to sell that definition to the people of this nation. He literally created the United States of America as a self-defined nation through salesmanship.

This nation itself, the result of the act of revolution, exists solely because our forefathers were sold the idea that they could toss off the most powerful monarchy in Europe, and create themselves as a brand new sovereign entity. Now, that was a sell job, no matter how romantic you want to get over it. Raw sales, pure and simple. Those folks put their asses up for that one, and there was nothing beyond the strength of the sale that existed to assure any of them that a rag-tag alliance of 13 fiercely independent colonies would ever survive in a world where Kings and Queens made those kinds of decisions, and had for centuries. Those were some salesmen that founded this nation of ours.

So, as the Clinton Machine grinds on, in search of the momentum that will forever elude it, Barack Obama will continue to sell us on the notion that we can be better than we’ve been for a long, long time. She’ll continue to scold us for buying into the fantasy that we can somehow rise above the mundane nature of our true selves, and do more for this nation than get out there and shop our way back into a hollow Wall Street version of prosperity, as if the Bush years haven’t taught any of us a damn thing about how profitable that strategy was going to be for any of us. She’ll continue to convince us that she can “play the damn song” just as good as anyone can, and that this is what being a great president should be about.

Meanwhile, Barack will continue to make the sale that he’s been making all along. That we don’t have to see ourselves as petty and small-minded. We don’t have to cheer on the most ruthless and cunning cheat-shot artist, as they lie, cheat and steal their way into the White House. We don’t have to fall for the embarrassingly obvious “Swiftboat” tactics of these dark years that we need to put behind us, as we mull over our options in this time of desperately needed change.

I’m sure that Ms. Clinton has some great ideas for what the next administration should embrace as policy and direction. I haven’t seen anything that strikes me as repugnant about her platform or her proposals. I even believe that she’d be able to get a lot of things done if given the green light to go ahead and get them done. What I just don’t believe is that she’s got what it takes to get that green light she’d need. I don’t believe that she can sell us on believing in her, or in believing that we’re a part of what she wants to accomplish as our leader. Maybe that’s our fault. Maybe we just can’t visualize the future that she sees for us. Then again, what is the job of a president beyond enabling us to see our future as he, or she, envisions it for us?

It’s the greatest sales position in the entire world, and it requires the best salesman we can find to properly fill that position. Barack Obama sells people on the belief that they “can”. He doesn’t even need to expand on that notion of “can”, because he knows that “can” is an ever evolving quality. He sells people on the notion of “hope”, and isn’t ashamed to embrace that wonderfully naive word as a warm blanket for all of us against the bitter freeze that we’ve suffered for far too long as a people who just want a reason to feel good about waking up to a new day in our world. Barack doesn’t try to sell us on the idea that he’ll save us from ourselves. He sells us on the idea that we’ll save us from what has become of us at the hands of those who have done their best to sell us on the curses of fear, greed, emotional isolation, and societal provincialism.

Barack Obama is the salesman that Hillary Clinton isn’t, and never will be. It’s the difference between someone who could be a great president, and someone who could help someone else be a great president by being part of their team. I hope that this all ends peacefully and respectfully, because we need both kinds of people in the Oval Office next year. One to plow through the red tape to get the job done, to “just play the damn song”, and the other to inspire us to pitch in and provide the forward motion for that effort. Neither can succeed without the other, and I just hope both discover the value they each bring to the table. Then, I hope both accept the roles they were born to play in this vignette, and embrace them for the sake of us all.

This is a wonderful nation, and we could be the inspiration of the entire world if we could only agree to choose to be that inspiration. We need someone to help us come to that agreement. We need a great salesman right now, and we need that great salesman like we’ve rarely needed one ever before. Someone who can do more than “just play the damn song”. Someone who can inspire us to need to play that song ourselves. For our future, and for the future of the whole of mankind.