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Is America ready to elect a deep-voiced President?
As Senator Wills Morgan’s lead over his sole remaining opponent for the Democratic nomination stretches into the double-digits and the final day of primaries looms near, it’s finally time to confront a touchy question:
Is America finally ready to elect a bass-baritone President?
The sobering news for the Morgan campaign is that poll numbers bespeak the work that lies ahead if we are ever to become a truly timbre-blind nation. In the most wide-reaching study of its type, over 8,000 registered voters were presented with a list of hypothetical candidates in 2002. Only 12 percent indicated that they’d be willing to vote for a bass-baritone. If these numbers hold, this would put Senator Morgan 11 points behind even a falsetto, and only two points ahead of the only hypothetical nominee who polled lower: “a candidate who liberally peppers his conversation with dated ‘Austin Powers’ catchphrases.”
This despite the fact that the baritone remains the most prevalent vocal range among the male 49.1 percent of the population. There has yet to be an American President who spoke below the passo-tenor range.
Many leading analysts discount both history and polling data.
“I would certainly like to believe that we’ve moved past such antique prejudices,” says Dr. Michael Shearer, a Senior Fellow at The Estuary Group, a political thinktank based in Quantico, Virginia. “Since 2002, no fewer than eight baritones have been elected to Congress and after a racketeering scandal removed the elected tenor, Utah’s lieutenant-governor was sworn in as the nation’s very first basso-profundo state chief executive. These positive role-models are demonstrating that bass-baritones are by no means the buffoons they were once made out to be in the radio novodramas.”
The cause of the lower-register politician was also boosted by David McCullough’s popular 1998 biography of John Adams, in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author asserted that the founding father and our nation’s second President actually lived most of his life as a closeted baratino robusco, who elevated his vocal range to tenor-profectis pitch through the use of a novelty belt he purchased during his diplomatic years in Paris.
Despite these encouraging signs, it’s possible that Senator Morgan’s cause may be undermined by the very people with the most to gain by his election.
“His voice is deep, and we can all agree on that,” says Henry Bellweather, the National Chairman of “Barry’s List,” a political action committee that helps to fund the campaigns of bass candidates. “But his voice simply isn’t deep enough to promote true vocal equality. In his stump speeches, he always stresses the word ‘baritone’ in ‘bass-baritone’; all I’m saying is that he’d earn a lot more respect within the bass community if he embraced his natural register and stopped trying to ‘pitch up’ in order to make himself more palatable to undecided voters.”
The mere fact that a candidate of any vocal range below tenor-robusco has become the presumptive major-party nominee for Presidency indicates a palpable and welcome shift in the attitude of the American people. Still, the prejudice of the voter as well as the big Party machines towards tenor candidates is deeply-rooted in the national psyche and may be harder to shift than anybody would care to admit.
“America is a land where anyone can become President,” quipped humorist and playwright George S. Kaufman in 1936. “The full spectrum of its citizens is represented in the White House, from an A5 all the way to one octave above middle-C.”