Political Seance

   In the dreamy world of political hope, people seek solutions, and candidates feed that hope with stardust muffins. But as the Hoagy Carmichael song, with lyrics by Mitchell Parish, suggests, the melody that haunts memory conjures a dream that once was new. But while that was long ago, people still cling to hope. And that could be for the love of his life, a person or a job he had planned for but is no longer there for him.
   Successful campaigners, like popular songwriters, play on these hopes and dreams, conducting their audiences into the voting booth of nostalgia, thus transposing minor melodies into major marches for progress.
   Does this strategy work? Often, yes. The art of speaking can be a symphonic oratorio to entrance many thousands of supporters.   
   Some of the most powerful leaders of the 20th Century were spellbinding orators, and included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Such a list may also include such men as Huey Long, George Corley Wallace, or several European demagogues and dictators.
  So while a powerful speaker can be at once entertaining and entrancing and a force for good, that speaker can also be capable of entrapment.
   A responsible audience, therefore, must listen carefully, not only to the music but also to the message. Too often, the music and the cadence can be hypnotic, as the skilled orator buries the message -- such as it may be -- in the music, thus leading an uncritical audience down a primrose path to a tangled field of poisonous ivy.