Saturday, October 23, 2010

Shades of John Kerry... (UPDATED)

...here:

Gubernatorial candidate Bill White kicked off a campaign tour of Texas colleges with singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen on Friday at a honky-tonk near the University of North Texas campus.
...

White said one of Keen's most popular songs, "The Road Goes on Forever," reminded him that "the toll roads don't need to go on forever and Rick Perry's party is about to be over."
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who cringed at that. It really did sound like something John Kerry might have said on the campaign trail back in 2004, but maybe that's just me thinking of Kerry talking about how he was fascinated by hip-hop. (Would that some intrepid reporter asked White which version of the song he thought was better, or what his other favorite REK tunes were.) I sure hated to find Robert Earl Keen doing something like this. I don't mean to imply Robert Earl Keen is a moron here, but once again I must defer to the great Vincent Furnier, better known as Alice Cooper:

"If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal."

UPDATE! From my wife, in the comments:

"Given ol' Robert Earl's personal narrative of drunken laziness, much as I love his music I'm not sure I'd want him to be the guy promoting me."

And once again, I didn't even think about that. But then, again, given how painful it was to read about Bill White trying to be all hip and shit, it doesn't surprise me that his campaign would be so tone-deaf as to think Keen the singer-songwriter would make a good campaign booster.