Alternate title: The Democrats demonstrate their tin ear on populism. Again.
So. When Joni Ernst gave the official Republican response to the State of the Union address, she included a homely detail from her childhood: in the wintertime, she and all the other kids would have bread bags placed over their shoes in order to protect them from the weather. …And why am I bringing that pretty much commonplace, throwaway line? Well, I’ll let Peggy Noonan explain.
Leftism too has its class tropes, only they come from the opposite angle. Response on the left to Ernst and the bread bags was snobbish, superior and dumb to the point of embarrassing. First, they couldn’t believe it—no one wears bread bags on their shoes in a storm, how absurd, she must be developmentally challenged. Then they denigrated what she said, putting pictures on Twitter of themselves wearing bread bags on their feet, accompanied by comments that had all the whiff of the upper class speaking of the quaint ways of the help. Andy Borowitz, surprisingly, wrote a dumb, leaden spoof in the New Yorker that seemed a companion piece to Politico’s earlier use of a photo of Ernst that gave her crazy eyes.
Continue reading Joni Ernst and bread bags: both are, in fact, as American as apple pie.