The “Daily Beast” has run a photo essay, or novelty, or something, about how the Obama campaign and election have redefined “cool” in politics. My favorite: “Strategery” is out; “Pahk-EE-stahn” is in. I’m glad someone has admitted, at least tacitly, that Obama has been doing the whole “NPR pronunciation” thing. Today, for instance, I heard Andrea Seabrook interview Sir Roger Moore about his new memoir My Word Is My Bond. Sir Roger pronounces the title of the new Bond film Quantum of Soulless, and Andrea, despite not being British, follows his lead. It’s sälis where we live, Andrea—but you sure sounded smart!

I kid, sort of. What I’m really glad about is that someone has demonstrated how fully “cool” influenced this election. Yes, Michelle Obama wore J. Crew like the middle-class, not Oscar de la Renta like the wife of the most powerful man on earth. (We will conveniently forget that she also thinks the average pair of earrings costs $600.) Yes, Barack shoots hoops, a vastly more humane pasttime than shooting defenseless birds. Etc., etc. Not long ago I weighed in on the less trivial manifestations of cool and uncool:

In his The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch wrote that “the rise of mass media makes the categories of truth and falsehood irrelevant to an evaluation of their influence. Truth has given way to credibility, facts to statements that sound authoritative without conveying any authoritative information.” Lasch’s examples include “statements implying that a given characteristic belongs uniquely to the product in question when in fact it belongs to its rivals as well.”

Remind you of anything? The presidential candidates between whom we just chose are, as even my most liberal friends freely admit, similar in important respects. Both men spoke frequently of “change,” though only one’s followers reduced it to a creepy mantra, less David Bowie than Spahn Ranch. Both argued for clean energy, Obama tilting at windmills and hybrid cars, McCain asking us to accept the powerful and much-maligned technology already at our disposal. Both sought to address the financial crisis by pouring tax dollars into it.

The differences in their prescribed means were significant but technical, and I hope I won’t sound terribly “elitist” if I speculate that many voters focused on the ends and made their choice on the basis of another factor: marketing strategy. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are made with different “secret formulas,” comprehensible only to chemists, but they end up tasting similar to the casual consumer. Americans are not casual consumers, however, and the ad campaign is all.

Read the whole thing here.

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Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York. He has contributed on fiction and other subjects to The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and elsewhere.