Regular guyism

Can you imagine your words transcribed into a headline in a major metropolitan newspaper?

"I heard Rudy was here today," Mitt Romney told Stephanie Burrows, 18, who works behind the counter, as she recalled later. As he left with his ice cream, he said with a grin, "But everyone knows I'm the regular."

Read the rest of it. It's all baloney.

News flash: None of the people running for President are regular guys. The Democrats aren't (and if you think Dennis Kucinich is, you're not a regular guy, either), and the Republicans sure aren't.

But the media insists on force-feeding us this sort of obvious bullshit about favored candidates or candidates with favored PR people or candidates whose regular-guyism happens to fit into the conventional wisdom.

Mitt Romney is about as close to being a regular guy as Paris Hilton. Yet for some reason the media keeps looking for the regular guy in the elite, wealthy Republicans just when they need it. Duhbya is one breathtaking example. Regular guys bear the consequences of their choices; he never has.

You may recall that the agreed media narrative killed Al Gore's much more legitimate image-making about his regular upbringing in 2000. The media selectively attack any attempt by a Democrat to show the common touch.

Still, it's all image-making, and the media get co-opted into it mostly by one side. Oh, I'm sure the Boston Globe will print some hagiographic look back at JFK again soon, but he's really the only Democrat who still gets that kind of treatment.