Just got off the phone with John Hollander, who points out that all double trochees -- Harry Truman, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson, et al. -- are "musically inevitable" and can be sung to the tune of the title song of Oklahoma!
Thank you, John.
It's hard to get a perfect fit for the combination of trochee, iamb, and partial pyrrhic that constitutes "Barack Obama," but Hello, Young Lovers (from The King and I) works -- and Younger Than Springtime (from South Pacific) almost does.
-- DL
