The wall above the counter of the Florida Avenue Grill in Washington, DC, is a mix of entertainers, sports stars, and politicians.

When candidates for President go on the stump, I get indigestion thinking of all the junk they eat. But eating is an important part of politicking. Look at the walls of countless diners, pizza parlors, and hot dog shops, especially in the Northeast, and you see galleries not only of entertainers, but of politicians who are there in an effort to make voters think that they are just plain folks like you and me. Never have we seen a posted 8x10 of a Senator or President forking up a hunk of filet mignon or sipping an expensive Bordeaux. But rare is the office holder who doesn’t appear on hash house walls ingesting Dagwood sandwiches or sloshing down locally-bottled root beer.

The funny thing is that a lot of professional politicians don’t have a clue about how normal people eat. In 2003, when Senator John F. Kerry was running for President, he did the requisite thing when he visited Philadelphia: went to Pat’s and ordered a cheese steak. However, his handlers hadn’t done their research. The abashed Kerry was caught by reporters ordering his steak with Swiss cheese – a sacrilege! – and was then photographed by the pressmen nibbling daintily at the corner of the mammoth sandwich – another faux pas. Craig LaBan, food critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said flat-out, “It will doom his candidacy in Philadelphia,” explaining that to get Swiss cheese on a steak in Philly was “an alternative lifestyle.”

For those office-seekers whose hoped-for constituencies include a large number of health-conscious voters, it must be quite a predicament. Do they want to be photographed over a meal of tofu and wheat grass juice, thus winning support of enlightened eaters … but running the risk of being seen as elitists by the lunch-pail crowd? On the other hand, a picture of a candidate with a chili dog in hand – an image supposed to endear Mr. Would-Be Office Holder to the proletariat – is a surefire guarantee of scorn by the nutritional elitists of the food press. Remember the hot water President George H.W. Bush got into for dissing broccoli and admitting to a fondness for cuchifritos?