Hey, Maureen Dowd, I’m not bitter either. But just to clarify — we got our tickets out of economic disadvantage, didn’t we? You write for the Times and I’m sitting at Harvard. I wouldn’t fault my father for being a little bitter, though. He’s probably commuting right now because, even in his fifties, he still has to work the night shift doing highly physical labor. He spent most of his young adulthood working three jobs to pay for the only thing he ever wanted for himself: a little summer cottage on a murky pond in Maine. It wasn’t much to ask for, but he lost it courtesy of the Reaganomics your family was “more comfortable” with. He’s not bitter. He’s an Obama supporter.

My father’s favorite pastime is nursing a Bud Light and yelling at the TV when the Bruins are playing, but he doesn’t want Obama to come over and join him; he wants Obama to lead the most powerful nation on Earth. I’m not sure I truly believe that he’s in the minority on that. Many Americans do apparently labor under the idiotic pretension that the president should be “just like us” and should make us feel “comfortable.” These same Americans don’t seem to care overly much if a folksy pol who seems ripe for a night at the local watering hole was actually born to incredible privilege and has absolutely no intention of making life better for the working class. George W. Bush proved that handily enough.

Americans need to realize that the president must be, and should not waste time pretending not to be, a fiercely intelligent and scrupulously educated individual. If he develops a taste for Swiss cheese along the way to becoming those things, then so be it. The ideal candidate should be equally comfortable in a ballroom and a ballpark not because he has spent valuable time and energy acquiring the appropriate social graces for each setting, but because he knows that the Americans in that ballroom and in that ballpark are going to judge him on his policy chops and not on what he orders for dinner.

Obama’s “bitter” characterization was strategically regrettable, and so was the arugula comment. What’s more regrettable is the enormous fuss the media has made about both incidents and their potential bearing on the working class vote in Pennsylvania. Working class Americans should, and for the most part do, have enough self-respect to refuse to be buffaloed by phony populism; and I would bet money that no one in that bar with Hillary Clinton believed that she actually spends her free time knocking back brewskis and shooting skeet.