Hunh?

When he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, John Edwards made the obligatory appearance on "The Tonight Show." Jay Leno asked Mr. Edwards if he had been eating well on the campaign trail. "No," the senator from North Carolina replied, flashing his boyish grin, "I had two double cheeseburgers for lunch today."

The remark was classic Mr. Edwards, whose swift rise in politics has been hastened by his uncanny ability to make voters believe that, despite being a fabulously wealthy trial lawyer, he is really just a regular guy -- the kind of man who eats double cheeseburgers for lunch....

That's from a New York Times profile of John Edwards by Sheryl Gay Stolberg. The story actually gets better after that, but that's the lead.

What on earth is Stolberg's point? That, beyond a certain level of wealth, you never eat cheeseburgers? Has Stolberg ever heard of a guy named Paul O'Neill?

Instead of a detailed discussion, Bush was more interested in why the cheeseburgers he had ordered were slow to appear. He interrupted the talk to summon White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

"You're the chief of staff. You think you're up to getting us some cheeseburgers?" O'Neill recalled Bush saying. "Card nodded. No one laughed. He all but raced out of the room."

Oh, but it doesn't matter how rich Bush is -- he's a Republican, so he can't be a phony if he eats regular-guy food. And besides, as Stolberg's paper recently noted, Bush is ever so fond of "brush-clearing forays on his sweltering ranch in Crawford, Tex."

Of course, Edwards is actually saying he doesn't like subsisting on a steady diet cheeseburgers. If Stolberg wanted to paint that as elitist, she'd sort of have a point.

Dumb. Just dumb.