MARCH 4, 2008
If Obama wins Texas, this is one of the ways he did it
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 WEB VIDEO: "Viva Obama 2008" |
Original campaign songs were once de rigueur for presidential candidates (a tradition that gave us such chestnuts as “Grant, Grant, Grant” for — surprise! — Ulysses S. Grant and “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge” for Calvin Coolidge), but by 1976, when Gerald Ford’s “I’m Feeling Good About America” and Jimmy Carter’s “Why Not the Best?” failed to make a lasting impression, they’d mostly become curios — folksy electoral Americana. Now, however, just in time for Super Tuesday II, the practice gets a ripping revival with “Viva Obama 2008,” a Texas video from Amigos de Obama that features the coed band Mariachi Aguilas de Mexico playing a corrido that trumpets Barack Obama’s candidacy with horn-blowing, charro-suited panache.
Corridos are songs that often memorialize criminals as heroes — a tribute perhaps more appropriate for former presidents — but here the lyrics are entirely Obamafied: “He’s of humble birth and also unpretentious,” the song goes, and “working to obtain one vision.” One wonders if other ethnic groups might apply their musical folk forms to the rest of the campaigns: A polka band for McCain? Klezmer musicians for Hillary? Didgeridoo players for Nader?
“Viva Obama 2008” (for the translation of the corrido, click “more” in the About This Video box)
to Hillary Clinton’s Spanish-language campaign theme song
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