Weekend America Mixtape

You might find this mildly amusing:

The polls closed and a new president was elected. At that moment, at that precise instant when your candidate won or lost, what was going through your head? Emotions ran high from every side of the political spectrum, and sometimes those emotions are best expressed through song. We reached out to some friends of the show to find out what songs best describe their post-election mood. We put them together for a post-election mixtape.

Here’s my answer:

Reihan Salam:

Song: “Welfare Bread” by King Khan and the Shrines

I’m Reihan Salam. I’m a writer and editor at the Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation, and I consider myself a conservative. There’s a really terrific song by King Khan and the Shrines called “Welfare Bread.” I remember late in the campaign John McCain was accusing Barack Obama of wanting to raise your taxes and spend all the money on welfare, and it seemed that Americans were actually pretty excited about that idea. “Welfare Bread” is a song about a man telling a woman he loves that she doesn’t have to worry about working anymore; she can just eat his welfare bread. Which sounds like a — even as a conservative — a pretty charming and lovely idea. So I’m looking for my own slice of welfare bread, and maybe you are, too.

For the record, I worry that eating too much welfare bread will sap my capacity for self-help. But some welfare bread might make sense as a prudential response to the fact of brute bad luck.

Four of my best friends in life — Shapiro, Park, Mangin, Lieskovsky — converged on Washington this weekend, and I feel incredibly lucky. Frustratingly, I had to spend two precious hours watching the execrable W., and there’s more work to come. But boy, it was pretty great having them in one place, if only for a short time.