It’s hard to remember a political ad receiving the kind of praise being showered on Bernie Sanders’ unconventional new TV spot, America, which takes the name of the featured Simon and Garfunkel song. The ad won’t be remembered the way we still talk about LBJ’s Daisy, or Reagan’s Morning in America, but Sanders’ everyday-people music video is resonating at a high pitch by the standards of campaign season approved messages.



CNN reports goose bumps. The Boston Globe got chills. The Forward “double dares people not to feel something”. New York magazine evoked the emotional peak of 80s teen cinema, imagining Sanders as a slightly slumped white-haired John Cusack, holding up his boom box against the rain. The spot’s wistful, harmonized Americana even overpowered the other side’s 60s-bashing reflex. Aaron Goldstein of the conservative American Spectator flatly concedes: “I can objectively say that this is a very good ad”.

That it is. It’s also just a couple of bales of hay away from being a precision remake of a late-2000s American Express commercial.



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Ah, so what. It doesn’t matter that a financial-services company conceived the America ad years ago. Few pop songs or national motifs haven’t been degraded and defiled by modern advertising. More important is what the ad and its reception say about the candidate and his natural fluency in the language of the Boomer, a generation at the peak of its electoral power.

Though born five years before the official start of the Baby Boom in 1946, Sanders, who joined the Counterculture takeover of Vermont, is the first Democratic candidate who can pull off a campaign video backed by Sounds of Silence-era Simon and Garfunkel.



Even if every classic in the Sixties catalogue has been used to sell sneakers and credit cards, those songs still possess a powerful charge – one that makes them tricky to ride. How tricky? Anyone remember the national cringe that greeted John Kerry’s deployment of CCR’s Fortunate Son? Or just play America over a Hillary Clinton campaign montage. It jars, doesn’t really work. (Though lately, her campaign might get away with Bridge Over Troubled Waters.)



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Neither of the Clintons could attempt to harness the sweet, nostalgic searching of a song like America without looking ridiculous. There’s a reason Bill’s 1992 campaign song was Fleetwood Mac’s soulless Me Generation anthem Don’t Stop. In the light of Bernie’s America, Hilary looks even more like an establishment figure out of step with her time, feeling entitled to the energy of a generation she doesn’t really understand.



The ad offers an even more blinding contrast with the Republicans, where it’s hard to imagine much of a soundtrack at all, let alone one with the close harmonies and grand themes of America. (Writer John Kennedy anticipated this contrast with a bulls-eye back in August.) Following Neil Young’s demand that the Donald cease using Rockin’ in the Free World, the Trump campaign’s only notable musical venture of late has been the Kremlin-by-way-of-Orlando spectacle of the USA Freedom Kids singing The Official Donald Trump Jam.



The Cruz campaign, meanwhile, recently featured a generic country backing-track under an endorsement monologue by Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson. In the ad, both men wear masks of black face paint that evoke prepper-militias more than shotgunning waterfowl. The spot’s real soundtrack is bursts of buckshot.

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It’s not shocking that the candidate from the self-proclaimed hippie paradise of Vermont can tap the full power of a song like America for his campaign. At least, he can in a Democratic primary fight. Simon and Garfunkel won’t be what he’s looking for in the general.