And that’s how the headline would have looked if Bob Dylan had stayed in Hibbing and run for the state senate.
Seriously, in an unusual move Bob Dylan endorsed Barack Obama for president during a London Times interview published Thursday. While some might have assumed that Dylan is a liberal because his fans smoke the refer and he spoke out against war during the Vietnam years, the truth is that he is generally apolitical and seldom gets involved. He’s as inclined to rebel against the liberal establishment as easily as the conservative.
A better Dylan fan could probably recite every specific political figure he’s ever publicly supported, but I can only think of three off the top of my head. He gave JFK a shout-out in his book “Chronicles” for having the guts to hold a rally on the Iron Range during the 1960 campaign. He dedicated a song to Paul Wellstone the day his plane crashed on the Iron Range. And today, he said that he was excited that Barack Obama was trying to change the country for the better. Here’s the clinching quote from today’s London Times story by Alan Jackson and David Byers:
Asked about his views on American politics, he said: “Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.
“But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up … Barack Obama.
“He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.”
He added: “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.”
Leave it to Dylan to take all the reasons I like Obama … heck, all the reasons I’m involved in politics, and put it in one sentence.
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