Substance Defeats Optics

Mark Steyn's Saturday column is a real corker. It's all about a tone-deaf "transformative" transnationalist who ran into a spot of bother in Ted Kennedy's old stomping grounds when voters gave his candidate the finger and elected the dude with the redneck utility vehicle. To the chap in question, a pickup truck is, well, a pickup truck, useful for hauling sundry supplies. To Obama and his minions, however, who hew to a surreal worldview, ceci n'est pas un pickup. Ceci un symbol of America at its worst:

...The defining moment of his [Obama's] doomed attempt to prop up Martha Coakley was his peculiar obsession with Scott Brown's five-year-old pickup:

"Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads," the president told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. "Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck."

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama's line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown's pickup was a prop – like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the "Iron Chef" TV episode featuring delicious healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama's "kitchen garden": The cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the first lady and then picking choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then, for the actual cooking, the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York. Viewed from Obama's perspective, why wouldn't you assume the truck's just part of the set? "In his world," wrote The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, "everything is political, and everything is about appearances."

Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn't just any old prop but a very particular kind: "In some places, there are codes, there are images," he told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. "You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another."

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he's racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that's easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts...

Nice looking fellow; pant creases so sharp they could slice through cold buttah; exceptionally adept at purty speechifying: turns out it takes more than that to get folks to swallow an agenda of Gibungous Government, imbecilic political correctness and America lost in the transnational shuffle.

Update: Chuck Raasch says "never dis a pickup truck":

The pickup is as good an expression as any of American independence in 2010. It's halfway between sedan and SUV, neither a BMW nor a Smart Car, functional in city, suburbia and farm field, ready for both a gun rack and the haul to the organic farmers' market vegetable stand. It's the kind of vehicle many blue-collar independents drove to the polls to vote for Brown.

So when President Barack Obama went to Massachusetts to try to revive Democrat Martha Coakley's hapless campaign and in the process dismissed Brown's truck, it symbolized something much larger - the dismissiveness Democrats have directed at independents who have been leaving them in droves.