In need of a comic couplet ... Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Ohio, February. Photograph: Michael Czerwonka/EPA

Modesty: it's not exactly Americans' most beloved character trait. And as I watch the ongoing battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as they fight to clinch the Democratic nomination, I am struck by a profound sense that the candidates should have slightly less high self-esteem.

Get over yourselves, I imagine I would say to Barry and Hill, given the chance to have a chat with them. This is not about you. Do what's best for America. Haven't you ever read (see, this does have a literary point!) the greatest work of the greatest American poet?

I'm all over Walt Whitman, says Barack.

I'm conversant with Emily Dickinson, says Hillary.

Don't be silly, candidates! I'm talking about Ogden Nash, says me.

Yes, that Ogden Nash - king of 20th-century American light verse. Nash is without a doubt most famous for his pithy animal poems, which makes for a droll afternoon at the symphony when juxtaposed with Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals. But while the great man's meditations on the nature of the octopus ("Tell me, O Octopus, I begs / Is those things arms, or is they legs?") and other critters may be among his best-known, it is his ultimate paean to the value of modesty that, I believe, should be embraced by potential leaders of the free world.

For while "Kindly Unhitch That Star, Buddy" is marked by Nash's characteristically insouciant kinda-rhyming couplets - "I hardly suppose I know anybody who wouldn't rather be a success than a failure / Just as I suppose every piece of crabgrass in the garden would much rather be an azalea" - the underlying message is a serious one. Living one's life tethered to the tyranny of the boundless American dream can rather often end in tears because few people will ever actually reach the stars to which they have pinned their dreams.

Nash sanguinely offers a positive spin on inevitable disappointment: "Which perhaps is just as well because if everybody was a success nobody could be contemptuous of anybody else and everybody would start in all over again trying to be a bigger success than everybody else so they would have somebody to be contemptuous of and so on forevermore."

Get it, you two? Should you really be wasting all of this time haggling over who gets to run when the important thing is simply to ensure that the Republican stranglehold on the White House (and the world) is finally relinquished? I realise that they're politicians, and thus bound to be fairly brimming with confidence, but at this point shouldn't one of the two fall on his or her own sword to clear the way, ensuring that the Democrats regain the White House? Clinton's suggestion that Obama should drop out of the race to become her running mate was a bit cheeky, but in a way it makes sense: in either permutation, a ticket featuring both of them would probably be a political juggernaut. But neither of them is willing to accept the secondary job that has been famously described as equal in value to a bucket of warm saliva, and as a result things are getting unacceptably petty and personal.

Alas, embracing Nashian modesty is not considered to be a part of the skill set required for candidates for the commander-in-chief. It almost makes me want to run for President myself one day, just to push through a policy that will make Ogden Nash's modesty masterpiece required reading material for all Americans who "...think they will eventually wear diamonds instead of rhinestones / Only by everlastingly keeping their noses to their ghrinestones".

But I won't. It would be a bit overambitious.