In the final few months of a presidential campaign that has certainly been the most heated in recent memory, it’s rather surprising that no one has planned a Broadway revival of the great Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing. Though it was written back in 1931 during the Herbert Hoover administration, the show retains an almost uncanny similarity to the farce-cum-extravaganza currently being played out in Washington and on the campaign trail. In fact there is only one real anachronism in the show: a running gag about the anonymity and irrelevance of the Vice President. (No doubt this was funny once, but Dick Cheney and Al Gore have exploded the ineffective-V.P. cliché forever.)

Everything else is spot-on. The First Lady has to prove she’s a real woman by making delectable corn muffins—well, remember Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton’s chocolate-chip cookie bake-off? Candidate John Wintergreen’s campaign song proclaims his love for the Irish and the Jews—and what about today’s “inclusiveness” and “rainbow coalitions”? Wintergreen’s handlers are a little non-committal about just what party they actually represent (“We’re Republicans in most states,” they admit, “but the South is Democratic, so there we’re Democrats”) —well, what about our current candidates’ struggle to “claim the center”? Wintergreen runs on a one-word platform, and so do today’s candidates: in his case the word is “Love,” while in theirs we hear “Change” and “Experience.” Remember when everyone was talking about Hillary as the “inevitable” candidate? Well—“The people of this country demand John