It is time to update the trochaic analysis of presidential politics inaugrated in this space back in August 2008 when the system predicted Barack Obama's electoral victory.
The double trochee is the conventional standard for presidential names: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Warren Harding. The effect is heightened when the name is alliterative: Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson. Nota bene (AKA BTW): A trochee flips the metrical pattern of an iamb: it consists of an accented beat followed by an unaccented one. Think of it this way: "Oklahoma" is a double trochee. Sing it. "Okla -homa, Okla-homa. We knew we belong to the land, / and the land we belong to is grand" -- Oscar Hammerstein's revision of Robert Frost's vision of the land in "The Gift Outright," whose composition is contemporaneous with that of "Oklahoma!"
None of the Republican candidates still in the running this year (Romney, Santorum, Paul, Gingrich, Huntsman, Perry) parses out as a double trochee. If Romney and Gingrich had normal first names, like Milton and Nathan, they would qualify, but it is too late for that. From the point of view of trochaic theory Ron Paul would be a disaster for the Republican Party.
Barack Obama's name parses out as an iamb (Barack = unstressed foot after stressed) followed by an amphibrach (Obama = long syllable sandwiched between two short ones). This is a vey difficult combination to defeat. Vice-President Joseph Biden is a pure example of the double trochee, and a safe choice, but the Democrats have an ace in the hole. If the Republicans nominate Romney and he runs well, Obama may propose that Biden and Hillary Clinton exchange positions. (He will have taken a page out of the Ronald Reagan playbook, where, if memory serves, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and White House Chief of Staff James Baker swapped jobs in Ronnie's second administration.) There are compelling political reasons for this maneuver, and trochaic theory indicates that Hillary Clinton -- a dactyl followed by a trochee -- would not only strike the right metrical balance but would augment it the way the key change after the bridge in Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are" raises the ante.
If you are wondering why the image of Franklin Roosevelt heads this piece, it's not only because last night we saw David Grubin's brilliant 1994 documentary FDR but because "Franklin Roosevelt" (trochee first, dactyl second) is metrically an exact inversion of "Hillary Clinton," thus creating a formidable chiasmus, and history loves a chiasmus, and you can look it up.
-- DL
