Of thee I sing, baby,
You have got that certain thing, baby,
Shining star and inspiration
Worthy of a mighty nation,
Of thee I sing!

These lines are lyrics by Ira Gershwin from the opening number “Of Thee I Sing” in the Broadway musical of the same name (music by George Gershwin), which premiered in 1931. The show is a political satire in which a presidential candidate’s campaign and romantic entanglements are treated with comic irreverence. The lyric deliberately echoes the patriotic hymn “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” but replaces solemn national devotion with the language of popular love songs (“baby”), signaling the show’s central joke: public politics and private desire are intertwined, and patriotic rhetoric can be repurposed as show-business spectacle.

By grafting Tin Pan Alley endearments onto a phrase associated with national anthems, Gershwin punctures the grandeur of political and patriotic speech. The “baby” addressed is both a romantic object and a stand-in for the nation, suggesting how easily civic ideals can be sentimentalized, marketed, or redirected toward personal charisma. The lyric’s exaggerated praise (“Shining star and inspiration / Worthy of a mighty nation”) reads as knowingly overblown, highlighting the performative nature of campaigns and the way slogans can substitute for substance. The refrain “Of thee I sing!” becomes a wink at the audience: what sounds like reverence is also a comic admission that politics is, in part, entertainment.