No sooner do I write an article about the American nomenklatura and their distance from the proles they control, but one of them, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) indulges in the flip-side of that attitude by publishing a photo of himself going all Regular Guy Barbecuing.

Naturally he got ratioed to death on X-Twitter, to the point that he deleted it.

The Interwebby thing is forever,… Chuck – as likely is that fucking awful raw burger patty with the cheese slice on top (means that whoever else was there, including the photographer, was equally clueless about ordinary humans).

But what the hell was he thinking? What are any of these politicians thinking when they try to pull this crap? I’m reminded of John Key being handed a hammer to whack in a few nails on some election bill board a few years ago. In the wake of that none other than his wife made the mirthful, if polite, remark that “John’s not a handyman around the house”.

Which is fine. I didn’t expect a Wall Street trader to be so; aside from anything else why would you bother when can buy the services? In other words it didn’t change my opinion of Key as a politician or PM one iota, let alone my vote.

Same here with Schumer. Such a PR effort is pointless in our cynical age. Maybe it worked in the past but not today. I expect him to be a sleazy, oily, conniving fucker in the Senate on behalf of his Democrat Party and policy that he’s always been. As with Key, the barbecue stunt would never change my opinion of Schumer or my vote – and that’s likely to be as true of the voters who support him as much as it is of those who oppose him.

By contrast I doubt if anybody on Norman Kirk’s Labour team ever tried a similar photo-op of him doing brickwork. Presumably it was enough to know that he’d built his own brick house years earlier (he didn’t just lay the bricks but cast them), thus marking him out as a genuine member of the Working Class. Such men felt no need to fake it and were equally proud of having made it to Parliament where they could prove that they had other skills, including debating against men with supposedly better education.