The far-left publication Politico revealed its bias in a poll soliciting all the presidential candidates. This market sampling, titled “We Asked the 2024 Candidates to Pick the Songs That Stirred Their Souls,” forced the contenders to follow the Obama playbook. The upshot? Left media will always own the Right when they hoodwink conservatives into behaving just like liberals.

At a moment when outsider songs from Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony have enlivened the pop charts, getting Republicans to praise the music business that largely — openly — despises them was a devious move. Politico enticed candidates to strike a “common man” pose, kissing the music industry’s behind just like pols used to kiss babies’ asses to win over susceptible constituents.

The trick behind this scheme is to ignore serious issues on which Democrats are weak but that Republican also fail to stress. The pop-culture charade — a Beltway parlor game — finds Politico imitating lowbrow tabloids, like that Us magazine feature showing media stars shopping so readers will think that celebrities are just like them.

The canard that politicians and pop-music stars share style, rebellion, and originality was exposed during the Covid lockdowns through the shameless conformity and blatant partisanship so many showbiz folk displayed. By urging pols to seek popular approval through their music choices, Politico reduced GOP candidates to that same venality. Asking politicians what “stirred their souls” is a Barbara Walters move, exposing Politico’s phony political principles.

Because most politicians are squares, and conservatives are so almost by definition — sometimes as a point of honor — they have difficulty keeping up with popular culture. That’s why the Left commands the culture wars. Politico deviously linked candidates’ choices to Spotify’s streaming site, a dubious campaign boost to make them seem less out of touch when it comes to pop music. But the real effect was to push so-called conservative media to take note, as Fox News pundits did, of Politico’s trivializing contest and promote the resulting tone-deaf humiliation:

Chris Christie topped his list of 20 songs with Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” apparently because Christie couldn’t choose “Born to Run,” New Jersey’s state song, without drawing attention to his own failed presidential hopes.

Nikki Haley led off with Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll,” which nobody believes except as another feminist-garbed pitch at breaking cock-rock’s glass ceiling. (Haley’s team really should have dissuaded her from including Howard Jones’s insipid “No One Is to Blame.”)

Vivek Ramaswamy’s first choice, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” sounds like a roundabout way of endorsing the “one shot” theory ratified by Hamilton.

Will Hurd’s choice of “I Gotta Go” by Robert Earl King led an eccentric list that put him way out of popular contention (a loser’s version of Oliver Anthony’s recent political ambivalence).

Larry Elder’s list, led by Motown’s “My Girl,” was a racialized version of Hurd’s banality; Elder’s limited, old-guard perspective excluded anything released after the 1970s. (Bland exceptions: two Boyz II Men tracks and a Phil Collins inanity.)

Asa Hutchinson began with “Ophelia,” the Levon Helm version rather than The Band’s — an obvious attempt to dress up anti-Trump sentiment as yesterday’s fringe vest.

Cornel West’s list showed Politico going way left-field. (Biden, Newsom, and Robert Kennedy Jr. are not in the poll, so it’s bizarre to include socialist West as the only non-Republican respondent.) West’s tasteful shortlist cited only four songs (predictably led by John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”) yet confirmed his limited, race-based parochialism.

It is Elder and West who came closest to mimicking those year-end cultural commissar lists issued by Obama’s publicity team. Who really knows what these pols escape to in their hours off the stump? But Politico made sure that we know they don’t pay attention to the original, dissenting voices in our culture — the moral, political, and musical risks recently taken by Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, and John Lydon. These unsophisticated poll choices were all songs without an edge — or their former edges have been worn down by time and familiarity. They’ve also missed the guiding lights of previous eras: Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, Bob Marley, Chuck D, Morrissey, the Smiths, and Public Enemy.

Maybe the typical journalistic bias to exclude Trump explains his absence here. Did Trump not respond? He might have named his frequent rally tune, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, one of the greatest of all rock tracks — a shrewd choice that asserts an unassailable political reality.

By disregarding Trump, Politico reveals itself to be no better than the wannabe tastemakers at Rolling Stone magazine.