Hillary Clinton turns 69 today, and like any grandmother who likes to kick back with some smooth tunes and a good cry, she spent her last hours of 68 listening to Adele.
Clinton celebrated her big day a few hours early at Adele’s concert in Miami on Tuesday night, where the singer beseeched the crowd, “Don’t vote for him.”
As a Brit, Adele abides the polite custom of referring to unsavory characters in euphemistic pronouns like “you know who” and “him.” At Tuesday’s show, her target was clear: If she’s not pro-him, she must be #withher. “I am English, but what happens in America affects me too,” she said. “I am 100 percent for Hillary Clinton. I love her; she’s amazing.”
What a birthday gift! A pat on the back from the world’s most simultaneously perfect-seeming and reasonable-seeming celebrity! An Adele endorsement is a major win, because she has the mass appeal of—I don’t know, air? She’s all around us, wafting out of department stores and Ubers and friends’ bedrooms at every moment, such that her voice has become one with the thrum of the earth, the comforting sound of a mother’s heartbeat for a fetus in the womb. People who oppose Adele are like breathers who prefer a lungful of Victoria’s Secret “Scandalous Dare” perfume to clean mountain breezes.
That’s why Clinton called Adele her “go-to voice” on Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine’s SiriusXM show earlier this year. There may be no more all-pleasing music-maker in the world today. The Clinton-Adele lovefest recalls the candidate’s endorsement of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels on her campaign podcast last month, a statement of art appreciation as risky as wearing Storm Trooper get-up to ComicCon. Adele, for her part, has invoked politics at previous concerts, but she’s mostly been coy about naming names. She told a Washington audience that this election cycle has made her “embarrassed for humanity”; after the second presidential debate, she said, “I watched the debate, and you should know who I like and who I do not fucking like.”
Adele is so universally beloved that she’s become a favorite among Republican presidential candidates, too. Trump has been known to play “Rolling in the Deep” and “Skyfall” at his rallies, even as Adele has asked him and fellow fans Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee to stop poisoning her songs with their politics. Last November, Trump allegedly cut in front of the entire line of people waiting to get into Adele’s New York City show, not a good look for a self-made everyman who urges respect for borders and walls.
Clinton was not about to repeat that mistake. According to the Clinton camp, Adele might not have even known that Clinton was in the audience on Tuesday night. What with all the security that precedes and follows a presidential candidate and former first lady wherever she goes, that seems highly unlikely. Maybe for some fans, it’s the thought—future presidents going unnoticed at arena shows until they get a personal shout-out, they’re just like us!—that counts.
