“I go to Washington as the representative of no faction or interest, answering only to my conscience and to the people. I’ve got a lot to learn in the Senate, but I know who I am and I know who I serve. I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours.”–Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown

“Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.”–Cervantes, “Don Quixote”

Of course you can smell my truck. I don’t mind. Yeah, it still has that new truck scent. But I assure you that’s because I’m tidy, not elitist. No pretentious liberal phony-scent trees dangling from this mirror. No, sir. Just an American flag, my Helen Gurly Brown commemorative fuzzy dice (a gift from Cosmo) and a tea bag still dripping with earl gray patriotism. Oh, that other smell, you ask? That’s the smell of victory<\p>–<\p>the people’s victory! Now, with all due respect, please back away from the truck. You’re leaving grease stains on my populist decal.

I know what you’re thinking. How in the heck did a regular patriotic pro-life guy like me take on the juggernaut of the liberal establishment? Well, to tell the truth, I never thought I would end up in politics. It always seemed like a sordid scene run by backroom deals and shadowy interest groups. Capitol Hill brought to mind a cocktail hour intrigue of smug corporate lawyers, spineless party hacks and lobbyists from whose double-breasted suits flowed endless free steaks and Coogi sweaters. What’s more, it was worm-ridden with political philosophies, ideologies, party platforms, all sorts of things that, to a normal liberty-loving dude, sounded pretty suspect.

And, if my car hadn’t broken down that one fateful day, I surely would have carried on being a sedan-driving, golf-playing, nude-modeling drone of the liberal establishment. But when I showed up at Hertz for a replacement rental, my loafers in tatters, all they had left were pick-up trucks. After upbraiding the sales assistant, I resigned myself to the truck and drove home feeling awkward. But something strange happened on that drive home.

At first, the changes were small. I started hanging my arm out the window. I tuned in to AM radio. I started whistling the national anthem. But more perceptible transformations soon followed in their wake. A paranoid fear of illegal immigrants crept over me. I felt the sacred institution of marriage crumbling beneath my feet. My love of unborn fetuses became so overwhelming that I had to pull over and buy a pro-life bumper sticker.

At the highway rest stop, I noticed, much to my amazement, that I was trading banter and sharing laments with the other huddled masses piling out of their pickups and into the urinals. Despite wanting to liquidate their homes and send them to prison, I felt a genuine affection for their folksy desperation and lack of opportunity. I then realized what had just happened to me: I had become an everyman.

Back on the road, my new everyman aroma spewed forth from the exhaust pipe of my everyman machine, sweetening the air with a new hope for democracy.

The minutemen militias of delusional hockey moms and other dangerous ignoramuses crawled out from their bunkers and followed my fumes. They immediately recognized this scent as their own, with its stench of raw civic discontent not masked with any artificial rational fragrances, and proclaimed me their king.

So, here I am, just another small town beauty queen taking on the political machine. As an everyman, I like my democracy old-fashioned (circa 2004): without health care, steeped in war and favoring the rich.

But don’t you go thinking we’re the same as the everymen of yore. Sure, Harry Truman may have made a big fuss about being a small potatoes yokel from Independence, Mo. But then he had to go and ruin his everyman image with a palpable sense of history and an intellectual commitment to governance.

You know what that reeks of? Expertise! Elitism! Now, how are you supposed to serve the people if the people can’t relate to you? And how are the people supposed to relate to you if you know more than they do? That’s bad reality TV and bad democracy. Instead, the everyman politician of the 21st century must be a convincing avatar. When the American people look into the political mirror of democratic government (or Cosmopolitan), they want to see themselves, only with killer abs.

Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a sweet truck.