Can a Presidential Candidate's iPod Playlist Reveal Their Personality?

It's too bad that we didn't have iPods at any time prior to the 2000's so we could get a look at the playlists of our Presidents. Every President is expected to have an iPod now (good news for Apple, as if they need it) and what we wouldn't have given to see the playlist of George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or even Ronald Reagan. Well, at least the media would occasionally share what a President's favorite Christmas song was or even an individual pop song for a few 20^th century leaders of the free world. Now, we all must know what every single song is on a President's playlist or even the playlist of a Presidential candidate. And the more songs that are revealed, the more of a psychoanalytic portrait people are painting to help us perhaps figure out what's making a current President tick or who would make the best future Commander (or Cheerleader) in Chief.

The first ever President to reveal his iPod playlist was George W. Bush, which subsequently created more parodies of his "real" playlist on the internet than you'll probably ever see with McCain or Obama. As we found out about four years ago when the iPod was just starting to become hot was that Bush liked one particular musical genre: Country, Country and, yesiree, Country...with a little 70's rock and folk thrown in to represent a classic Texan song list. At the time the list came out, people psychoanalyzed every single song title to get a representation of Bush's thoughts. This was not long after the Iraq war started and, of course, right during the time when the threats from terrorism were constantly in that red color (or was it pink salmon?) phase.

While people tried to extract meaning from his chosen songs done by Alan Jackson, George Jones and even Stevie Ray Vaughan ("The House is Rockin'" was Bush's choice there)--they were probably just songs that helped him escape from the pressures of war and a slowly eroding support from the public. Others might argue it was a good indication of how he felt about his job (John Hiatt's "Circle Back", The Thrills' "Say it Ain't So" and Van Morrison's "New Biography").