Self-professed socialist Bernard Sanders could soon be in the highly coveted company of Grammy Award winners that includes his former presidential-campaign rival Hillary Clinton.
The independent Vermont senator and 2016 Democratic presidential contender was nominated Tuesday in the spoken-word category for the audiobook version of “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In,” Variety reported Tuesday.
Mrs. Clinton was nominated twice in the same category. She won the first time around in 1997, becoming the first sitting First Lady to do so, for the audio version of “It Takes a Village,” Variety reported. Her second nomination, for the audio version of her “Living History” memoir lost out to Mr. Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them.”
Spoken-word category Grammys have often proven to be occasion for the worlds of music and politics to intersect, with Democrats vastly outnumbering their Republican counterparts for the honor.
Three sitting U.S. presidents — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — and four U.S. senators — Al Franken, Everett Dirksen, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — have received spoken-word Grammys, with Mr. Dirksen, an Illinois Republican integral to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the lone Republican in the mix.
Mr. Dirksen, then the Senate minority leader from Illinois, won in 1968 for the album “Gallant Men: Stories of the American Adventure.”
The only other major Republican political figure to have been nominated for a spoken-word Grammy was former President Richard Nixon, alongside British journalist David Frost for “The Nixon Interviews with David Frost.”
The 60th annual Grammy Awards will air on CBS on Sunday, Jan. 28.
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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