The DJ in Chief

How to make a country love you in 2012? Say it with a playlist

Illustration by Lincoln Agnew for TIME; Getty Images (6)

Songs on the Spotify list that Obama's campaign released on Feb. 9

If President Obama should win re-election this November, it will not be because he stood at the Apollo Theater on Jan. 19 and sang a couple of bars of "Let's Stay Together." That the President got a bump in the polls after he busted out a dead-on imitation of the Rev. Al Green was more likely attributable to a good jobs report than critics' reviews. And whether his success in the polls lasts will depend more on his economic record than his falsetto.

And yet there was a reason millions of people watched the clip of him singing on YouTube. It...

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