Kerry Tales, Part XLI

Last Friday, candidates Kerry, Edwards and their families were photographed at a Wendy's in Newburgh, New York, lunching with the common man. Turns out their actual meals were waiting on the campaign bus:

A member of the Kerry advance team called Nikola's Restaurant at the Newburgh Yacht Club the night before and ordered 19 five-star lunches to go that would be picked up at noon Friday. Management at the restaurant, which is operated by CIA [Culinary Institute of America] graduate chef Michael Dederick, was told the meals would be for the Kerry and Edwards families and actor Ben Affleck who was with them on the tour.

The gourmet meals to go included shrimp vindallo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto, wrapped stuffed chicken, and steak salad. The meals came to about $200.

That's "roughing it"--if you're a millionaire like Kerry or Edwards.

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As always, Mark Steyn says it better, in Tuesday's Telegraph (UK; free registration required):

[I]t turns out John Edwards is right: there are two Americas - one America where folks eat at Wendy's, another America where the elite pass an amusing half-hour slumming among the folks at Wendy's and then chow down on the Newburgh Yacht Club's specials of the day.

Steyn says that this sort of "tonal disconnect is only going to get worse between now and November."

In 1992, pictures of a baffled George Bush père marveling as a supermarket clerk demonstrated a barcode scanner were seized on by the media as evidence of how out of touch he was. But barcode scanners were introduced to supermarkets during his 12 years at the White House, and a sitting president or vice-president doesn't get many opportunities to go grocery shopping. The difference between Bush Snr and Kerry is that Prince John of Gaunt seems far more isolated from the rhythms of American life and he hasn't even got to the White House yet. . .

At the convention last week, Ted Kennedy urged Americans to make sure that, this January, John Kerry has a "nice new home". But, thanks to his wife's first husband, he already has five multi-million-dollar homes, including a 15th-century stone barn dismantled and shipped over from England to serve as their ski chalet in Idaho.

By contrast, George W. Bush has one modest ranch in Crawford, a town no one would choose to live in unless it genuinely was his home. As Noemi Emery put it in the Weekly Standard, Kerry is not just "the richest man ever to run on a national ticket", but also "the most self-indulgent in his lifestyle, and the most quasi-royal in his sense of himself".

Such a condescending and counterfeit character should disqualify Kerry's candidacy--if the biased liberal media acted as correspondents, as opposed to cheerleaders. Don't believe me? Just read the New York Times:

When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington.

Is that fair or balanced? Depends on the meaning of "is."