Bobby Womack: OK, I am dead serious about this one. For several reasons. Several reasons that would take up whole volumes if I gave them the space and time they deserve. Bobby Womack has lived a hard life, and has (depending on who you talk to, sure, but you're talking to me right now) always tried to do what was right, even when it caused everything to blow up in his face. But this is a small matter next to the real core of his qualifications, which is his ability to create beauty where none was.

Why should we not ask of our leaders that beauty be a concern of theirs: not just something they might invoke should they happen across a sunset or a shoreline while the press corps are around, but the first thing they think about when they sit down to their day's work and the last thing troubling them before they nod off into tranquilizer-assisted sleep? The sole cause of all our suffering is that we don't have enough daily contact with beauty. It's not enough to know that it's there in the world for the taking: beauty is something we need to give and receive to and from one another as often as possible.

But our daily experience, as the years wear us down as if we were rocks at the bottom of a rushing river, is that beauty can't help us; that it was something we worried about when we were teenagers, or college students, but that the mature person worries less about lofty things than about practicalities. Well, people: the Womack presidency is going to bring that sort of sold-out cynicism to grinding halt. If our President has brains & breeding & money & power, but has not the ability to produce a song as rending as "Across 110th Street," then he is as a noisy bell or a clanging gong, and is worthless to us. Bobby Womack may not be the best man for ensuring the continuing separation of Church and State, but I am wiling to make a few sacrifices here & there. I would not trade my freedoms for security; I'm sorry that I've had to do so under President Bush. But for more beauty in the world of the sort that Bobby Womack's voice provides, I would happily sign over all my civil liberties & most of my fingers besides. It would be a a small price to pay.