• "Hey! Hey, kid! Yer daddy's a drunk!"

We're skipping ahead a couple of elections to 1840, now—I can't seem to find anything about the music of the 1832 or 1836 elections—and we find ourselves in the middle of a huge clusterfuck of an election. The Anti-Masonic Party was slowly dying and all the parties were in flux. Incumbent Martin Van Buren was running against William Henry Harrison and his vice presidential pick, John Tyler.

Harrison had a couple campaign songs, but Van Buren apparently just had one. But what a campaign song! It's incredibly weird, and it's sung to the tune of "Rockabye Baby." Here are the lyrics:

Rockabye, baby, Daddy's a Whig
When he comes home, hard cider he'll swig
When he has swug
He'll fall in a stew
And down will come Tyler and Tippecanoe.
Rockabye, baby, when you awake
You will discover Tip is a fake.
Far from the battle, war cry and drum
He sits in his cabin a'drinking bad rum.
Rockabye, baby, never you cry
You need not fear OF Tip and his Ty.
What they would ruin, Van Buren will fix.
Van's a magician, they are but tricks.

Crazy! It calls the opposing party a bunch of drunks, and their candidate a scaredy-cat alcoholic who can't even drink alcohol that is uncontaminated. At the end, they say "Vote for our guy, because he's a wizard." You've got to admire the pluck and playfulness of these lyrics—that past tense of "swig" is genius—but it's kind of an off-putting campaign song, in that it insults half the population of the United States. Points for gusto—not even Sarah Palin would have a campaign song like this one—but major points off for sheer aggression.

Lyrics: 8.5
Enthusiasm: 3
Infectiousness: 1
Total Score: 4.17