Jesse Taylor hypothesizes that "Hillary Clinton" would have won the Democratic nomination if she had run for (and been elected to) the U.S. Senate from Illinois rather than new York. Thank you, Gerry Canavan, for the heads up.
This makes sense if only because the Clinton express would have elimninated competition from any other Illinois politician. More to the poetic point, the metrics would have been superb, as "Hillary Clinton of Illinois" is an exact repetition of the immortal pattern of dactyl, trochee, and double iamb last found in "Abraham Lincoln of Illinois."
Not enough has been made of Hillary Clinton's decision to quote T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" for the epigraph of her senior thesis at Wellesley College.
Maya Angelou (who read a poem at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration) and Hillary Clinton on the campus of A. R. Ammons's alma mater, Wake Forest University in North Carolina (2008).
Ryan of Pawtucket asks whether there have been presidents whose names scan as double dactyl. Yes: Benjamin Harrison and Theodore Roosevelt.
Virginia H. of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, wonders what are the longest presidential periods dominated by double troochees: 1913-1933 (Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover); 1976-1988 (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan); 1963-1974 (Johnson, Nixon).
-- DL
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