Art & Creativity Quote by Charles King

Calling music “one of those true things” is a politician’s kind of confession: a reach for moral ground that can’t be filibustered. Charles King frames song not as craft or commerce but as a “gift,” language that borrows from faith and civic ceremony. It quietly elevates musicians (and by extension, the speaker’s own appreciation of them) into the realm of the virtuous. That’s strategic. In public life, where every position has a constituency and every sentence can be weaponized, music becomes a safe territory - an arena where sincerity is presumed and opponents look petty for disagreeing.

The verbal hedging (“just like... I think”) matters. It’s not the polished cadence of a stump speech; it performs spontaneity, the rhetorical equivalent of rolling up your sleeves. The pause suggests he’s reaching for something bigger than policy language, signaling humility and emotional access. Politicians often get criticized for sounding scripted; this kind of halting phrasing reads as unguarded, a bid for trust.

The word “universal” does heavy lifting. It’s an appeal to shared belonging without naming race, class, religion, or nation - a shortcut around the divisions politics must navigate but can’t easily heal. Subtext: if we can agree on music, maybe we can imagine agreeing on each other. It’s also a soft power move: aligning himself with culture as a unifier, not conflict as a brand. In an era of fractured publics, “song” becomes a proxy for consensus - not because it’s apolitical, but because it’s the closest thing to a public commons left.