Over at Salon, Bill Maher attacks both Bush and Kerry for the apparent posturing as "Washington outsiders", in a column that's adapted, verbatim, from a segment from Maher's show last night. Bill does a paragraph on Kerry's rich wives, for no apparent reason other than as a setup for a really silly joke:

Please, John Kerry: Stop rolling up your sleeves at campaign rallies like you're about to man a register at Costco. You're a Boston Brahmin who married not one but two eccentric heiresses -- you're not Joe Sixpack, you're Claus von Bulow. I think your current wife is great, but hello, she inherited the Heinz fortune! She's the ketchup lady! -- which explains why sometimes he's gotta smack her on the bottom to get her to come.

Oh god.

That line got about 2 minutes worth of laughter -- not laughter and then applause, but just sheer laughter -- on the HBO show on Friday.

But putting that aside, I don't think that when Kerry "rolls up his sleeves" he's trying to assume a populist, "outsider" stance. Such a roll-up can imply that, but it can also stand for preparation for hard work, and sending Bush back to Crawford will be just that.

And yes, we know all about Yale, Nantucket, Skull&Bones, and so on. But as Senator Gracchus said in Gladiator, "I don't pretend to be a man of the people. But I do try to be a man for the people."