On beer and wine

David Brooks tries his hand at a dialectic:

QUESTION: Dr. Retail, now that the Democratic presidential race has entered its long, bloody slog phase, I figured it was time to get a fresh perspective. Can you explain to me what it’s all about?

DR. RETAIL: Why do you bother me with simple problems? Listen, the essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s Walgreens, and there’s The Body Shop.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider.

This is the very entrenched conventional wisdom at this point, and I don't get it. The assumption is that Clinton supporters drink beer, Obama's drink wine. Clinton's supporters use PCs, Obama's use Macs. And so on and so on.

A couple months ago--before this campaign turned into a bunch of primary contests, with Clinton leading in national polls--I suppose the idea had some appeal. But that's all gotta end out soon, right? One might never guess this sitting at a cafe in Washington or the Washington suburbs, but American Democrats--like all Americans--drink more beer than wine, they use PCs in much greater numbers than they use Macs, they shop at Safeway much more often than they do at Whole Foods... and yet they cast ballots in greater numbers for Barack Obama than for Hillary Clinton.