My candidate is a crazy man.   Today I had a convo with Harvey himself over the music choices for the campaign.  We’ve got some great stuff for the TV spots, really bright and hopeful, all that Gotham can be and should be.  The Gotham City that was before Garcetti came along, and the Gotham City that will be again when we beat him.

Anyway, the TV spots are going to be super but we still needed to pick a tune for the public appearances:  speeches, rallies, and especially election night. 

Harvey wanted to use the Charlie Kane song from Citizen Kane!  You know, “you buy a bag of peanuts in this town, they write a song about you”?  That.  I couldn’t believe it!  Harvey says it’s a catchy tune, which okay, yes it is.  He said it doesn’t sound like a Sousa march, and yes, I agree.  That’s a rare feature in any tune played by a brass band behind a podium where a political candidate is about to make a speech.  But the thing is – and I couldn’t believe I was the only one pointing it out – Charles Foster Kane LOST.  He’s a TRAGIC figure.  He had all that promise, and look how he wound up. 

Is that really the image we want for Harvey Dent?

Yikes, gotta pick up the lunches.  To be continued...

They all looked at me like I was speaking Swedish.  Maybe I violated some unspoken rule disagreeing with the candidate’s choice that way, but COME ON! 

So Harvey takes me aside, arm on my shoulder, and he gets that little hint of Harvard in his voice that never comes out in public but it creeps in when he wants to remind you that he’s Ivy League and you’re not.   He said that I raised some very interesting points, but after all, we weren’t going to be using the lyrics of the song. (“He loves a joke, HA HA HA HA” Oh yeah, that’d go over really well right now.)  We’d just be using the tune, which wasn’t written for the movie at all.  This is when he really turns up the Harvard accent as he tells me the Charlie Kane tune was taken from  "A Poco No" by Pepe Guízar.

“Well that’s real interesting,” I told him. “I didn’t know that, Mr. Dent, but then again, I don’t think any of the voters will know that either.  Anybody recognizes the tune, it’s going to be from Citizen Kane.  Anybody that doesn’t recognize it and just registers it subliminally, it’s going to be ‘He doesn't like the Mister. He likes good old Charlie Kane’.”

He gave me a really searching look then, maybe ‘cause I can’t sing for shit but probably because there really is a rule about disagreeing with a candidate and I not only broke it, I was breaking it twice.  Ma always says “in for a penny, in for a pound” so I took a deep breath and added that Harvey himself had asked for the Citizen Kane song, not “A Poco No” by Pepe whatever.

He laughed at that.  Maybe it’s okay to break that rule after all.  He asked if I’d heard the story about when he resigned as ADA.  Of course I did but I said I hadn’t.  He said it was true and he reached in his pocket and pulled out a quarter.  Tossed it to me and said I should do the honors.  Heads, I had to use A Poco No, like it or not; tails, it’d be the Harvard Fight Song.