Arugula vs. Many Giant Houses

As you probably already know, the other day a reporter asked John McCain how many houses he has, and he said:

"I think -- I'll have my staff get to you. It's condominiums where -- I'll have
them get to you."

Obviously this is hilariously elitist and out of touch, and that’s how most people are treating it, including in this new ad from the Obama folks. Why not just shout out a number? “Five? Yeah, five, whatever.” Then at least a staffer could come along and justify it. Brooke and Mark must be beside themselves, since now they have to add “basic facts of your own life” to their daily briefings.

But there are two other important things about this story that I’ve noticed.

1. This bodes really poorly for McCain’s ability to manage the largest economy in the world. “Number of houses owned” is a pretty important factor in understanding your own finances. It’s not like he’s unsure of the rate of growth of his equity investments vs. his fixed income investments. It’s more like, he owns and presumably frequently visits enormous luxury properties, the number of which can be counted using your fingers, and he’s never bothered to find out how many there are.
   
2. The Republican response has been a comically frantic rundown of every idiotic label they’ve tried to stick to Obama since the campaign began, which reminds me, what’s up with constantly talking about arugula? To me it looks like Obama was probably joking in the initial arugula thing, when he said to a bunch of Iowa farmers, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and seen the price of arugula?”, but I can see how conservatives might have missed that, since he didn’t throw in anything about a gorilla raping an Iranian to death. But more importantly, what’s elitist about arugula? At my grocery store it costs the exact same as spinach, which, on a per-pound basis, is something like 1/100th the cost of McCain’s elitist shoes. Does arugula sound fancy or something? Because it’s not some exotic foreign delicacy. Where I shop it’s just sitting there, right by the spinach, costing little. Maybe real Americans just go into grocery stores to kick over the applesauce.
   

Bonus trivia: Apparently McCain (probably Cindy; all this stuff is really hers) also owns a parking lot worth $1 million.