WP: Salad Spinning
Today's Campaigns Pick a Side: Arugula vs. Iceberg Lettuce
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 23, 2008; Page C01
(Julia Ewan/WP)
Arugula
....Without question, it is the most politically explosive of the leafy greens.
At the loftiest levels of American politics, there are operatives who are eager to play the arugula card. When Barack Obama's campaign skewered John McCain this week for forgetting how many houses he owns, the McCain camp responded by dropping the a-word on him -- twice. First, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers sent out an e-mail describing Obama as "a guy who worries about the price of arugula." Later in the day, Rogers said in an interview, "In terms of who's an elitist, I think people have made a judgment that John McCain is not an arugula-eating, pointy-headed-professor type."
Obama's arugula problem dates to last summer, to an offhand remark in Iowa. He was saying that farmers could make good money planting specialty crops rather than just corn and soybeans. He asked his audience if anyone had seen the price of arugula lately at Whole Foods. Pundits howled: Arugula! Whole Foods! As if the mooing masses of Iowans had ever heard of such a thing or such a place!...
***
(T)his remains, at core, an Iceberg Nation. According to the United Fresh Produce Association, American farmers grew 6.3 million pounds of "head lettuce" -- iceberg -- in 2007, more than twice as much as the next-most-popular lettuce, romaine. In fact, the iceberg total is more than romaine, green leaf, red leaf, spinach and every type of specialty lettuce combined. The great virtue of iceberg lettuce is that it is remarkably consistent and doesn't look like something that was ever anywhere near the ground. Arugula, by contrast, is flamboyantly plantlike, and with its vowel-heavy name is clearly foreign, and a reminder, politically, of Obama's exotic biography.
The arugula issue echoes what has become known as the beer-wine divide, also known as the Dunkin' Donuts-Starbucks divide. In this case, it's the meat-vegetable divide. The Republican attack on Obama's salad preferences is a page right out of the beef industry playbook: For years, the beef industry has promoted the notion of beef as "Real Food for Real People."...
Republican campaign strategist Mike Murphy wrote in Time magazine that working-class voters are suspicious of Obama, whom they see as one of the over-educated executive-types who are constantly downsizing the workforce: "Deep down, they think he'd rather hit the executive gym for a cardio workout during lunch hour than share a cheesesteak and beer with the hourly workforce." In this formulation, simply being health-conscious separates a candidate from the common citizen.
But there's also the money issue. Obama mentioned Whole Foods, a company that has no stores in Iowa, and which typically locates itself in upscale neighborhoods....
But there's one good piece of breaking news for Obama: McCain in recent days has been making regular forays to a Starbucks. And did McCain get coffee? No: cappuccino. The arugula of hot beverages.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082202958_pf.html
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