Dear Politicians (and their supporters):
I know lots of wonderful people who drive pickup trucks: my dad, my father-in-law, a lot of my friends and family members.
I also know a lot of assholes who drive pickup trucks.
Please stop acting like owning a vehicle with the ability to haul larger items represents any sort of moral superiority.
Thank you.
Can you give us a cite of a particular politician (or politicians) actually doing this?
Scott Brown recently won Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat. He campaigned in a beat up GMC pickup truck:
It’s been a semi-meme this past week with Brown in Massachusetts. Like some sort of bona-fides. “He’s down to earth; he drives a pick-up truck, ferchrissakes!”
Whatever, it’s political theater like Ron Paul wearing sneakers to prove that he’s down home as though ugly ratty sneakers are any cheaper than some comfortable but nice looking shoes.
Bet it’s got an ejector seat.
I’ve been hearing about Scott Brown’s pickup truck all week, and how awesome he is for driving it.
Fred Thompson’s brief run for President prominently featured a red pickup truck, though it turned out that the truck was rented.
It’s a pretty common thread in smaller races in the South.
The reason this is big news today is because Scott Brown drives a pickup truck with 200,000 miles on it. It’s supposed to show that he is a man of the people, that he’s not tooling around in a Mercedes that costs more than you make in a year, therefore he’s one of us.
It’s part of the standard Everyman gambit for politicians. He’s better than a career pol because he’s like you. The irony of this that every time an Everyman goes to Washington he gets captured by the system and turns into that which he says he is not.
Well, except Gilbert Arenas.
Right – I hadn’t been following the Massachusetts campaign that closely.
Back in 2007, I was at a public function where the state governor and the city mayor both took off their ties before addressing the crowd. Were they saying that wearing ties in morally inferior? Or were they just trying to say (like Senator-elect Brown) that they were men of the people? It’s a symbolic gesture – not worth pitting at all.
Yep. Now that Brown has his shot at the big time, I sense a new car in his future.
IMO, anyone who drives a pickup by choice rather than because s/he needs a pickup’s cargo capacity is generally saying that s/he doesn’t care about mileage or environmental impact. My husband had a pickup…and he has a farm. Driving a shiny tricked out pickup around town is just a fashion statement, it doesn’t mean that the driver is an Everyman.
The OP has a point. But going after the truck presents political risks. President Obama attacked the truck in a speech, and Brown was able to turn that around pretty effectively:
Had numberless other things been different, the truck issue would have been a nonissue. I worked for a candidate once who tried to use her little red truck as a motif of her campaign - the truck got more traction than she ever did.
I don’t think Brown is an Everyman, but he likely needs the truck - his daughter is a competitive equestrian. Hauling horses and their supplies around can’t be done with a Prius.
Oh, how I long for an economy in which I too can afford a $1000 piece of shit truck.
This is correct. Not just for hauling hay and shavings; for pulling a horse trailer to shows or the vet and so forth. You need a pickup with plenty of power, too, not one of those weeny little play pickups.
Americans self identify strongly with our creation mythology - that we are rugged individualists who carved a nation out of the wilderness with the sweat of our brow and our bare hands. Any politician who can tap into that mythology effectively will attract supporters. It’s not something that works at the intellectual level, it works at the emotional level.
So, while you may lament that this is the case, I’m quite confident that it will always be so.
Seems like every time I come across a pickup on the road, he’s either an aggressive asshole tailgating and changing lanes constantly, or a clueless moron driving below the speed limit in the fast lane.
My personal favorite is one who takes the same commuter route I do. He drives about 10 mph below the speed limit, in the fast lane, and honks at anyone who passes him on the right.
Plenty of English people own horses and don’t require pickups. Perhaps American horses are just fatter or something.
“Competitive Equestrian” implies that the horse and rider are going places. In this country at least, it’s not particularly easy (unless you board your horse at a stable which is run by a school for competitive equestrians, which can be ungodly expensive) to find someone to haul your horse to competitions for you.
If one is NOT boarding their horse with a stable but has their own horse barn, manure and feed need to be hauled–and preferably in a vehicle that can be hosed out afterwards.
I suspect demographic differences and land availability are part of this–and I guarantee you that if there’s a horse, someone in the chain of that horse’s caretakers is driving something approximating a truck for part of the maintenance of said horse.