The Gideonse Bible   With the beard? Yeah, you!

If you want to understand why David Cook should win “American Idol” this year, just listen to his version of Billie Jean. It may be Chris Cornell’s arrangement, but he didn’t record it like David Cook did. Good Lord: This is a ridiculously great single. In fact, if you were to download all of David Cook’s songs that he recorded or performed for “Idol” this year — available on iTunes for, um, six more hours — you’d have a damn fine album of covers. David Cook sings like the greatest rockers, but he also performs the songs — he emotes, he expresses.

If you did the same with the other finalist, David Archuleta, you’d be stuck with a bunch of treacly ballads that don’t make any emotional sense. I love how Sasha Frere-Jones described him in The New Yorker:

This season’s favorite is seventeen-year-old David Archuleta, a smooth-skinned man-child with a giant smile, a good voice, and a creepy inability to become displeased with himself. Though the song is not a technical challenge, “Sweet Caroline” stumped Archuleta, who is better with big, fat expressions of positive somethingness. John Lennon’s “Imagine”? Sure! It’s optimistic and vague. “Sweet Caroline,” though, is both wistful and obscure, and needs to be sung as if its series of images described an emotionally logical sequence, even if Neil Diamond’s lyric is not tied to anything as dull as logic. (“And when I hurt, hurting runs off my shoulders.”) Diamond’s song is stubbornly ambiguous, until the killer chorus brings everyone to their feet. Archuleta opted to smile, sing for the cheap seats, and trust that unalloyed sincerity and the killer chorus could carry the day.

Exactly.

Sadly, last night, when the two of them competed head to head, Cook performed brilliantly but Archuleta performed cynically. And when it comes to earning votes on “Idol,” cynicism always beats talent. Archuleta played to the cheap seats. He sang the song that made him the front runner, “Imagine,” again, and again sang it as if he was trying to win a talent show: eager, eager, eager. When Cook sang “The World I Know,” it seemed like he was singing the leave-’em-wanting more encore to his stadium show five years from now. Cook is just too good. Archuleta is just too lowest-common-denominator.

It’s also so Obama vs. Clinton.

UPDATE: I was wrong. Happiness!