What is it about a Canadian’s warbling ballad to a politician broken by one too many rides on the election merry-go-round that makes it germane to the current American election?Ĭertainly all of Young’s sharply critical observations are present.
“Campaigner,” by rights, should have relegated to the same cultural scrap heap as other songs about weirdly specific news items like Rush’s “Countdown,” about a 1981 space shuttle launch or the White Stripe’s little ditty “The Big Three Killed my Baby,” which is about corporate espionage in the automobile manufacturing industry.ĭespite its hyper-specific references to Richard Nixon, a politician who hasn’t even been alive since the 90s, let alone in office or on the campaign trail, the song contains some quality that keeps it from sliding into irrelevancy. By the time the song was pressed to vinyl the news story about a former head of state whose wife suddenly became ill and then recovered was forgotten and replaced by some other piece of gossip. It was released as something of an afterthought on the 1977 compilation Decade (an album which must have seemed like a fastidious and career spanning feast at the time, but in retrospect feels woefully incomplete considering what we now know about Neil Young and what we know his music is capable of mutating into). I assume they had no idea what to think of it. Though his beach got too crowded for a strollĪrmed only with a tattered acoustic guitar, Young played the song for an audience the night he wrote it. It’s a Nixon who still yearns despite the global embarrassment of losing the American presidency, a Nixon who still dreams of making some kind of headway on high-minded ideas even when he is at his ill wife’s bedside. The lyrics hint at notions of mortality vs.
“Guess I felt sorry for that night,” Young would later say of the song.įelt sorry for him indeed.
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