Prose

Prose or poetry? Among the metaphors employed in this most bizarre and media-driven campaign, one metaphor that both hits home and holds water (kids, try this at home) is the literary trope comparing Hillary and Obama.

Like yin and yang, she is prose and he is poetry. She is the seasoned and reasoned voice of experience, the tested and practical source of solutions to brass-tacks problems. He is the fresh and inspiring energy of youth, the promise of new thinking, new blood, and new hope.

It's an appealing combination on paper, and in many ways it's a good kind of problem to have. Either poetry or prose would be better than the illiterate we've got, eh? For all the progressives, small-D democrats, and liberals out there, it makes for grand entertainment on the big public stage in the big tent that is the big-D Democratic Party.

It's like high noon in Dodge City, and Sidney Poitier is facing Katherine Hepburn in the dust on Main Street, while Lee Marvin sips a cold one in the Long Branch, cleaning his six-shooter and waiting.

The country obviously needs both qualities, poetic and prosaic, and rarely do they come in the same package. Maybe Jefferson, maybe FDR. It would be a mistake to expect Obama's kind of energy from Hillary or Hillary's Washington savvy from Obama. Think of Angela Merkel, the reigning rock star of Deutschland, or the larger-than-life folk British folk hero Gordon Brown. Prose or poetry?

Personally I'm not voting for guru or artist-in-residence, I'm voting for city manager. If I was looking for inspiration (and I am), I can find other sources than the head of the executive branch of the U.S. government.