I don’t have a problem with the idea that what wins in New York City is not the same as what wins in Iowa, that the US is a big country with all kinds of diversity, etc. But when I read an article in the New York Times like this—so prominently featuring a photograph like this—I don’t see Iowa, or what a moderate Democrats needs to do to win in Iowa. I see an Upper East Side Jewish guy’s idea of what a moderate Democrat in Iowa looks like and needs to do.

Ben Rhodes, who wrote the article, grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, got an MFA at NYU, was so mobilized by a sense of patriotism after 9/11 that he almost joined the military—he got as far as the Queensboro Bridge, where he met with a recruiter—but decided that he could best and truly serve his country by joining a think tank in DC instead. And from there it was the Obama White House.

Now here he is, however many years later, ejaculating over the “Kennedy-esque good looks,” the “boyish good looks,” of a young, and of course, moderate, Democratic candidate for governor.

The whole thing reminds me of the movie The Way We Were. The Robert Redford character wasn’t the fantasy or dream of Barbara Streisand; he was the fantasy and dream of Arthur Laurents, the screenwriter, also a New York Jew who had an idea of what the perfect goyisch golden child from America should look like.

In Rhodes’s case, the look is more the dreamscape of Alfred Rosenberg and Ernst Röhm than it is Robert Redford or John F. Kennedy. But the function or mask of the aesthetic is the same: paired with a relentless political moderation, it’s supposed to zhuzh up the pedestrian banalities of someone who’s got his political head buried in the sand, as if the people of Iowa aren’t smart or sophisticated enough to notice.