Barack Obama faced a tough choice at a downtown Raleigh bar Tuesday.
If Obama had ordered a non-alcoholic beverage at the Raleigh Times Bar, such as unsweetened tea, he might have presented himself as a teetotaling, arugla-chewing lightweight, Michael Biesecker reports.
However, the choice of cold-draught Pabst Blue Ribbon — signature beer of the blue-collar worker — could be viewed as either a down-to-earth choice of a man with simple tastes or a naked pander to the working-class voters courted by Hillary Clinton.
And in the contest to be the candidate voters would most like to share a drink with, Clinton had preemptively set the bar high with shots of Crown Royal whiskey at bar in Indiana last month.
PBR is also the cheapest beer on draft at Raleigh Times, displaying a measure of fiscal conservatism. Though with an $18 tip to the barkeep, Obama made a play for charity as well.
Obama avoided controversy by not selecting the next beer over on the tap. One can only imagine the fun Rush Limbaugh would have had if a Democrat who wants to pull our troops out of Iraq had ordered a beer called Surrender Monkey.
(Not to mention that its 8 percent alcohol content might have hurt his oratorical skills.)
Regardless of what he drank, Obama effectively courted the home of flue-cured tobacco by entering the smoking section first.
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