Libs dominate Grammy Awards' spoken word category, as usual: Obama, Clinton, Ellen, Maddow

misstripleem | 3:58 PM on February 08, 2013

michelle obama straight got a #GRAMMYNOMINATION for best spoken word album.

— Mesha (@ReSOULute) February 6, 2013

https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/299344544984621056

What do these recent Grammy winners have in common? Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore. http://t.co/Jg6B6qt0

— ryan teague beckwith (@ryanbeckwith) February 6, 2013

On Sunday night, it’s almost a sure bet that another liberal will take home a Grammy Award in the Spoken Award Category.

As Ryan Teague Beckwith reports:

A 1961 Grammy was awarded to “FDR Speaks,” a boxed set of recordings of speeches by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A collection of interviews about the late President John F. Kennedy with members of his family won in 1966. And a set of interviews with former President Harry Truman was nominated in 1978.

…

Then, in 1997, Hillary Clinton recorded the audiobook version of “It Takes a Village,” a collection of her thoughts on politics and values. Clinton’s star power helped bring new recognition to audiobooks, a growing segment of the publishing industry, though she joked that she didn’t know they gave Grammys to “tone-deaf people.”

Within a few years, politics had all but taken over the category.

The Academy went on to recognize a streak of former, future and would-be Democratic presidents, with Bill Clinton winning in 2005 for “My Life,” his autobiography; Barack Obama taking the honors in 2006 for “Dreams from My Father,” his autobiography; Jimmy Carter winning in 2007 for “Our Endangered Values,” a treatise on politics and religion; Obama winning again in 2008 for “The Audacity of Hope,” a campaign book; and former vice president Al Gore nabbing an award in 2009 for “An Inconvenient Truth,” a book about climate change.