Alice Cooper – "Elected" (1972)

I never lied to you

I’ve always been cool

I wanna be elected!

They say a leopard can’t change its spots.

They also say that a politician will shove his mother out of the way if she’s standing between him and a camera.

Here’s a recent photo of the head of my county’s government, Marc Elrich, attending the annual celebration of the Holi festival with local followers of the Hare Krishna movement:

When I first saw that photo, I thought that someone had pranked Elrich.  But it turns out that Holi – which people celebrate by throwing colored powder at each other – is actually a thing.  (Who knew?) 

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The obvious explanation for Elrich’s willingness to attend an event like the local Holi festival is that he’s a politician who is determined to leave no stone unturned in his efforts to put himself in front of potential voters.  (Is it possible that there are enough Hare Krishnas in Montgomery County to have any effect on local elections?  Better safe than sorry!) 

Elrich will be 77 years old when his second term as the County Executive of Montgomery County, Maryland – the home of 2 or 3 lines – ends next year.  You might think that would be enough to discourage him from running for re-election.  But there are plenty of recent examples of people that old or older holding high office to demonstrate that advanced age is no match for a politician’s ego.    

Unfortunately for Elrich, last year the voters approved a ballot measure prohibiting from running for a third term as County Executive.  And there’s really no other elective office that would make sense for him to seek.  (I can’t imagine he would run for a lesser office at this point, and the higher ones are all spoken for.)

Elrich to Montgomery County voters:
“We don’t need no stinkin’ term limits!”

So if Elrich isn’t running for re-election, why does he continue to attend events like the Holi festival and post photos of himself shaking hands and kissing babies on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere? 

Possibly for the same reason that the scorpion in the old fable stings the frog that is carrying it across a river.  

“Without me to carry you across the river, you will drown,” the frog asks after the scorpion delivers the fatal sting.  “So why did you sting me?”

“Because that’s my nature,” the scorpion answers.

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I’ll have a lot more to say about County Executive Elrich in the next 2 or 3 lines.

In the meantime, you’re invited to click here and enjoy the brilliant music video for Alice Cooper’s “Elected,” which was released in 1972 on the Billion Dollar Babies album.  (John Lennon once told Alice that “Elected” was a great record, but that Paul McCartney would have done it better.  One out of two ain’t bad.)

Click here to buy “Elected” from Amazon.

Alice Cooper – "Elected" (1973)

I never lied to you

I’ve always been cool

I wanna be elected!

Saying that billionaire David Trone spends money on his political campaigns like a drunken sailor is probably not fair to drunken sailors.

Trone knows drunken sailors, by the way – he and his brother Robert own Total Wine & More, which operates 250-odd liquor superstores in 28 states.  The company’s 2023 revenues exceeded $6 billion.  

Life is good when you’re a billionaire!

Trone set a record in 2016 when he spent $13 million of his own money in an unsuccessful attempt to win the Democratic primary election for Maryland’s 8th congressional district.  No one has ever spent more money to lose a race for Congress.

But Trone is no dummy.  When 2018 rolled around, he didn’t run in the 8th district again – he ran for the 6th district nomination instead.  (Trone didn’t have to change his address to run in the 6th district – members of Congress don’t have to reside in the district they represent.). Trone then outspent his Republican opponent by a 10-to-1 margin and cruised to victory in November.

Trone easily won re-election in 2020 and 2022, and probably could have held on to his congressional seat indefinitely.  But when one of Maryland’s incumbent U.S. Senators announced his intention to retire, Trone decided he was the man for the job.

That turned out to be a very expensive mistake!

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Despite being once bitten by his 2016 fiasco, David Trone was not twice shy.  He spent about $62 million seeking the Democratic nomination for Maryland’s open Senate seat, only to lose to Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.

And it wasn’t even close.  Alsobrooks beat Trone by a 53-to-43 margin.

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I’m old enough to remember when filthy-rich businessmen like David Trone were Republicans.  But if you’re filthy rich enough, you don’t really have to worry about how high taxes and inflation are – you can afford to be a Democrat.

I’m also old enough to remember when it was the Republicans who had the advantage when it came to buying elections.  But now it’s the Democrats who have a big advantage in campaign spending.

According to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan research group, Democratic candidates for federal office in 2020 heavily outspent their Republican opponents:

Biden’s campaign became the first to raise over $1 billion from donors.  Biden’s cash advantage over Trump helped him pepper swing states with far more campaign ads.  Biden also received more help from super PACs and “dark money” groups. 

Trump’s campaign raised $774 million.  Trump raised over half of his money from small donors giving $200 or less, a stunning figure no other presidential candidate has matched. . . .

In Senate races, Democratic general election candidates raised over $1.1 billion, easily dwarfing Republicans’ $752 million.  In House races, Democrats outraised Republicans $898 million to $763 million. 

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Pretty much every time I do a post about elections, I feature Alice Cooper’s 1973 hit, “Elected.”

Click here to view the fabulous “Elected” music video.

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Alice Cooper – "Elected" (1972)

I never lied to you

I’ve always been cool

I wanna be elected!

From the November 4 issue of the Washington Post:

David Andahl died of covid-19 in early October, just as the coronavirus was pummeling his home state of North Dakota.  But that did not keep the 55-year-old rancher from winning his race for the state House of Representatives on Tuesday. . . .

Posthumous victories like Andahl’s are rare in the United States, though not entirely unprecedented.  Since 2000, at least six dead candidates have won elections at nearly every level of government, from mayoral races in small-town Tennessee to a U.S. Senate seat.

Most recently, Dennis Hof, a brothel owner and reality TV star, won a seat in the Nevada state legislature in 2018.  About three weeks before his victory, Hof was found dead at his Love Ranch brothel outside Las Vegas.

(At least Dennis Hof – like Nelson Rockefeller – died happy.)

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This year, voting began at least 30 days before election day in Alabama, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.

So if David Andahl had been running for office in any of those states instead North Dakota, a number of voters – perhaps a significant number – might have cast their ballots for him before he died.

Since early voting didn’t begin in North Dakota until October 19 – some time after Andahl’s death – we can assume that everyone who voted for him on November 3 either (1) was not aware that he had died a month earlier, or (2) decided it was better to vote for a dead Andahl than one of his live opponents.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve voted in a number of elections where a dead candidate would have been preferable to the live doofuses who were listed on the ballot.

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Imagine if the Baseball Writers Association of America allowed early voting for the annual Most Valuable Player awards.  In other words, imagine that MVP voters were allowed to make their picks over Labor Day weekend rather than waiting until all the games had been played and the season was over.

That’s a pretty stupid idea, right?  After all, what happens in the last few weeks of a season is likely to be very significant when it comes to choosing an MVP.  It only makes sense for all the voters to cast their ballots after the season is over, when they have access to the full-season statistics that are relevant to a decision.

But we do things differently in presidential elections – which are certainly more important than Most Valuable Player votes.  

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Early voting bothers me.  

Not because it makes it a easier to engage in voter fraud – which it does, of course (at least on a small scale) – but because I feel like it just makes sense for everyone to be voting at the same time . . . like baseball MVP voters.

If you vote two weeks, or four weeks, or even longer before the election, what if some crazy sh*t happens between the day you cast your ballot and election day?  For example, let’s say – I’m speaking hypothetically, of course! – that one of the candidates comes down with a life-threatening medical condition on, say, October 2.

What if you had voted on October 1, or even earlier?  Maybe you’d be happy with your vote regardless because you would have voted for your candidate even if Jesus Christ himself was running against him.

But maybe you would have voted differently if you had waited until later.  

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What if your candidate ended up kicking the bucket before election day – like the unfortunate David Andahl?   

It’s likely that the dead candidate’s party would replace him or her with its vice-presidential nominee.  But the party could decide to name someone else – someone who wasn’t on the ballot at all.

If you had voted early for the dead candidate, maybe you’d be happy with the vice-presidential nominee (or a different replacement) taking the dead candidate’s place. But maybe you wouldn’t – maybe you would have voted for the other party’s nominee  instead.  

I have a feeling that if John McCain had died before the 2008 election and been replaced by Sarah Palin, the Democrats would have gotten a lot more votes.

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I admit that the odds of a presidential candidate dying a few weeks before an election are pretty slim.

But it wouldn’t be at all surprising if something happened after early voting had started that caused a large number of early voters to wish they had waited.  

Maybe a candidate says or does something really stupid a week or two before the election.  (That would be a real shocker . . . NOT!)

Or maybe a drug company announces that its brand-new covid-19 vaccine was 90% effective a week before the 2020 election instead of a week after that election?  

Given that tens of millions of Americans voted early – and given that most of those early voters would have voted for a convicted serial murderer over Trump – it’s possible that an earlier announcement of the news about the vaccine wouldn’t have mattered.

But if everyone had had to wait until November 3 to vote, it’s certainly possible that a pre-election day  announcement that an effective vaccine was just around the corner would have altered the outcome of the presidential vote.  

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There are plenty of examples of presidential elections being won or lost thanks to events that occurred shortly before election day.

For example, only eleven days before the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comey infamously sent a letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.  (Comey later said that he expected Clinton to win the election, and thought that if he held back on his announcement until after the election, people would accuse him of covering up on her behalf – which would have delegitimized her election from the very beginning.)

What if early voting had been as widespread in 2016 as it was in 2020?  Would that have significantly mitigated the impact of Comey’s action?  I think it almost certainly would have – perhaps Mrs. Clinton would have won despite Comey’s announcement.

(Speaking of e-mails and elections, wasn’t there some kerfuffle about somebody’s e-mails that came out a few days before Election Day 2020 – which was after millions of Americans had already voted?)

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The problems caused by early voting would be mitigated if early voters could change their minds after casting a ballot.  

As I understand it, it is possible to change an early vote in some states, but the process is somewhat complicated, which would discourage at least some people who would like to change their votes from actually accomplishing that.

But most states don’t allow you to change an early vote.  

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I’m not arguing that no one should ever be allowed to vote before election day.

After all, we’ve always allowed absentee ballots to be cast early by voters who were going to be out of town on Election Day, or who had to be at their jobs the entire time that the polls were open.

It seems reasonable to me to have a voting period of four consecutive days – Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday – which would avoid conflicts with religious beliefs and make voting a lot more convenient for working folks.  (There would still be some people who had a legitimate need to vote absentee, of course, but many fewer would be voting early than did so in 2020.)

Of course, that approach wouldn’t have really addressed concerns about covid-19.  Polling places wouldn’t be as crowded if you spread voting out over four days, but it might not have been possible to maintain perfect social distancing at all polling places throughout the four-day period.  Mailing ballots to voters and allowing them to be deposited in outdoor ballot boxes presumably minimized the possibility of any significant covid-19 spread as a result of voting.

But covid-19 won’t be a concern in 2024, right?  And the odds of us having another pandemic that year are probably no greater than the odds of a candidate being struck by lightning.

I guarantee you that we’re not going back to the old ways of doing elections.  It’s not obvious why early voting would generally favor one party over the other, but in practice it turned out to advantage one party greatly in 2020.  That’s going to make both sides fight like cats and dogs when bills that concern early voting are introduced in state legislatures in the future.

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2 or 3 lines previously featured Alice Cooper’s “Elected” on November 6, 2012 – which just happened to be the day Americans went to their local polling places to elect a President.

I noted in that post that Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign raised a whopping 60% more than the campaign of his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton and her supporters upped the ante considerably, raising almost twice as much as money billionaire (?) Donald Trump.

Trump and Clinton debating in 2016

The final numbers for 2020 aren’t in yet, but it’s clear that the Democrats had a huge fundraising advantage over their poor Republican cousins.  Going into the final week of the campaign, Joe Biden and Democratic Senate and House candidates had spent $6.9 billion, while Trump and the Republican congressional candidates had spent just over half that amount.

2 or 3 lines is so old that I remember when the fat cats in this country were Republicans, and the GOP was easily able to outspend the Democrats in the elections. 

But those days are l-o-n-g gone.  In 2020, Biden raised over four times as much do-re-mi from Wall Street guys as Trump did.

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Click here to watch the original music video for “Elected,” which is silly-bazilly (especially the part where the chimpanzee lights everyone’s cigarettes). 

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Alice Cooper -- "Elected" (1972)

Top prime cut of meat, I'm your choice
I wanna be elected!

Today's the big day.  In less than 24 hours, we should know who the next President of the United Staes is.  

We'll also know the identities of thousands of other officeholders: Senators and U.S. Representatives, governors, lieutenant governors, state attorneys general, state legislators, county executives, mayors, county and city councilmen and councilwomen, board of education members, county sheriffs, clerks of court, registers of wills, and countless others.  

But everyone's focused on the ne plus ultra of American elective office . . . the most powerful man in the world (after Chuck Norris) . . .  the capo di tutti capi . . . the POTUS.

I wish he was running for President!

I'll be watching the election results tonight for the same reason I watch "SportsCenter" on ESPN -- because I'm interested in knowing who the winners and losers are.  But the outcome won't matter that much to me -- nor should it.  I'll wake up tomorrow morning and go to the same job, I'll come home tomorrow night to the same house and family and dog and cat, etc., etc., etc.

That's the great thing about the United States, boys and girls -- for 99% of us, it really doesn't matter that much who wins and who loses.  Sure, most of us have a preference for one candidate or the other.  But your life over the next four years is probably going to be pretty much the same regardless of who the President is.  

So don't get all bent out of shape if your guy falls short.   Look on the bright side and count your blessings: we won't have to watch any political ads on TV for the next year or so.

Speaking of political ads, the Obama campaign has raised $632 million ($423 million from large contributions) for this election, while the Romney campaign has raised $389 million ($316 million from large contributions).  If my math is correct, that's over a billion dollars -- most of it spent in just a few states.  You and I may be glad that the campaign is almost over, but the TV and radio stations, local newspapers, direct-mail companies, and robocallers are fat and happy tonight.

The Billion Dollar Babies album cover

"Elected" was the third track on Alice Cooper's sixth studio album, Billion Dollar Babies, which was released in 1973.  But it was released as a single in 1972 -- October 7 to be precise, exactly one month before the 1972 election.

The 1972 election was a doozy.  President Richard Nixon's renomination was never in doubt.  But the Democratic nomination was up for grabs.

A total of 15 men and women sought that nomination.  Ted Kennedy would likely have won the nomination if he had run, but he declined to do so.  (Mary Jo Kopechne had died in his car in July 1969, but many people were apparently prepared to overlook his behavior that night and the lies he told about what happened.)

That left Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, the 1968 vice-presidential nominee, as the favorite.  The 1968 presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, also ran.  But neither man did very well.

The eventual winner was South Dakota Senator George McGovern, a "dove" who looked like a longshot at first.  (The darling of the doves in 1968, Eugene McCarthy, also sought the nomination but didn't get very far.)

Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, a more conservative Democrat, and Alabama Governor George Wallace, who said he no longer favored racial segregation but did oppose school bussing, were McGovern's most serious opponents.

(New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for President, won three primaries but never had a real chance to prevail.  Hawaii Congresswoman Patsy Mink, the first Asian-American of either sex to contend for the nomination, ended up with only a single delegate.)

Seven different Democrats won primaries in 1972

Wallace not only won primaries in four Southern states, but also finished first in the Michigan and Maryland contests.  But his chances of winning the nomination ended when was shot four times and left paralyzed on May 15. 

McGovern went into the convention with plenty of delegates to win a first-ballot victory, but the convention was chaotic.  McGovern chose Missouri's Senator Thomas Eagleton to be his running mate, but a number of the delegates who were unhappy with McGovern made their displeasure known by not voting for Eagleton.

In fact, the delegates voted for some 70 different men and women for the vice-presidential nomination.  Even Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (or Mao Zedong, if you prefer) of China got a vote.

Eagleton and McGovern

Within days, it was discovered that Eagleton had undergone shock treatment for depression.  After first saying he backed Eagleton "1000 per cent," McGovern changed course and asked Eagleton to step down.  His first six choices to replace Eagleton declined, so McGovern turned to Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to fill the void.

President Nixon was pretty popular in 1972, largely because he was credited with having achieved détente with China and the Soviet Union.  McGovern was viewed as an extreme liberal by many voters -- he was accused of being the candidate of "amnesty, abortion, and acid" by fellow Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the Nebraska primary campaign, and that label stuck.

The result was a landslide of historic proportions.  Nixon won 60.7% of the popular vote, while McGovern won only 37.5%.  The Electoral College tally was even more one-sided: 520 for Nixon, 17 for McGovern.  (Only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia favored McGovern, who died last month at age 90.)

We all know what happened to President Nixon, of course.  Within two years of the 1972 election, he was forced to resign from office due to the Watergate scandal.    

"Elected" made it to #26 on the U.S. charts.  Oddly, it did better abroad, reaching the top 10 in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.  (Not France, of course.  France always has to be different.)

Alice Cooper strikes a patriotic pose

I bought Billion Dollar Babies and several other Alice Cooper albums back in the day, and I think he's very underrated.  Most people remember him for his female name, his excessive makeup and weird outfits, and his over-the-top, horror-movie-inspired live shows.

But good old Alice (who was born Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit in 1948) knew how to write memorable songs.

By the way, David Byrne said that Billion Dollar Babies inspired him to write "Psycho Killer," the first song he ever wrote and arguably the greatest Talking Heads song ever.  

"Elected" has lines that seem like they were written for both candidates.

Don't these lines fit the typical Democrat's view of Mitt Romney's image?

A Yankee doodle dandy in a gold Rolls-Royce
I want to be elected!

And these lines could have been written about Barack Obama:

I never lied to you, I've always been cool
I want to be elected!

Here's the music video for "Elected."  Alice makes a pretty compelling campaigner.  (Don't miss the chimp's entrance with the wheelbarrow of cash at about 1:40.)

And here's a link you can use to buy it from Amazon: