Wordsmith

I was just reading Martin Kettle's meditation on Bob Kennedy in Saturday's Guardian. I'm always a little bit impatient with nostalgia pieces like that, because they always veer into hagiography and therefore tend to leave the facts behind, e.g. Bob Kennedy would've captured the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency without looking back. With a sitting Vice President in the race, a sitting Vice President who had the support of most of the kingmakers and the formidable apparatus of the Presidency behind him? I doubt it. But Martin Kettle gives us--or rather, Garrison Keillor gives us-- the following near-perfect phrase:

"Most of the things that Bobby said in those final months told you the same thing as Garrison Keillor says about hearing his brother Jack speak in Minneapolis in 1960 - that here was a man with more keys than usual on his piano, black ones as well as white ones."

Just think about that piano analogy... white keys AND the black keys, through which you introduce nuance and change into music...and most pols are all about the white, the bland, the happy, the studied avoidance of the minor key, all of it.

Wouldn't you love it if that had been said about you!? I'm stupefied. What a wordsmith Kellior is!