McDonald's, Coffee, and Sarah Palin

In advertising its new line of coffee drinks, McDonald's is employing the same strategy as the Republican Party: characterizing Starbucks as a place for effete eggheads and characterizing itself as a place for regular folks. Regular folks being, according to both McDonald's and the GOP, people who are not too bright—and are a little proud of that fact.

"I don't know where Paraguay is!" says one woman to another in a new TV spot as they revel in the fact that now they can now bypass Starbucks and head to McDonald's to drink their complicated coffee drinks in the company of simple people. The point apparently being that if you know where Paraguay is, you aren't just someone with a grade-school-level knowledge of geography: You are an elitist. And who wants to drink coffee with those people?

Barbara Lippert, a critic for AdWeek, told public radio's Marketplace last week that the ads amount to a "Sarah Palin moment" (though, of course, they were conceived before most people knew who Palin is). The campaign isn't about coffee-it's about "anti-intellectualism and shootin' and huntin'," Lippert said. It is meant to appeal to people who say they "really always hated Starbucks, and thank God for McDonald's and a real American option."

The bet for McDonald's is that there are lots of people out there who hate cultural elitists but love nonfat cappuccinos with sugar-free vanilla syrup, as long as they can drink them in an industrialized fast-food setting where the tables are bolted to the floor. You know—Reagan Democrats.

"I can't imagine that anybody could fall for this," marketing maven Faith Popcorn told Marketplace. It goes "beyond a negative campaign—this is condescending, to say that they're not smart enough to go to Starbucks."

Does this take "latte-drinking" out of the quiver for conservative narrative-framers who like to portray their political enemies—quoting the infamous 2004 Club for Growth ad—as comprising a "tax-hiking, government-expanding, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show"?