You might say that being able to fit in at a chain restaurant’s salad bar should not be a meaningful qualification for high office, but then you are not David Brooks (via Orr):

Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can go into an Applebee’s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.

There’s just one problem with Obama’s “problem”: there is no salad bar at Applebee’s, much less one that you can go “into” (how big does he think salad bars are?), as those of us common rubes who have actually eaten at Applebee’s can attest.  It seems to me that Brooks was grasping for some symbol of the Everyman, had probably read or read about Applebee’s America at some point, remembered something about the “gut-level connection” its author mentions as a politically significant factor and then concluded, “To have a gut-level connection with the Everyman, one must eat at Applebee’s and, most important of all, one must eat at the salad bar.”  But then this betrays a crucial misunderstanding of the American rube, since all fans of chain restaurants know that most people don’t go to these places for anything so healthy as a salad. 

Update: Video here.  Apparently the “Applebee’s guy” responds well to transactional politics, even though the “Applebee’s guy” is likely to be middle-class and suburban, who are typically not the downscale voters that have resisted Obama’s appeal for the most part.