Great minds indeed:
The way they did it was pretty sly —a low, medium shot with Bush Senior and the archetypal grocery checker behind the checkout counter, with CEO types behind, smiling.
It was down low enough from a child-customer’s perspective, so the audience would have no idea the bar-code was torn pretty badly:
The checker appears to slide a totally unremarkable pacakge of baloney or whatever across the scanner platen, and the TV audience hears the familiar, “Beep!” indicating a successful product scan, and “we” see the proper price displayed.
And Bush, surprised, exclaims something like, “Wow...!” and he’s all happy.
And yes, if the TV executive were really, really dishonest (which means ANY TV executive) any reasonable viewer would absolutely be disgusted and view Bush Senior as stupid or elitist, or both of those.
And I mean, I don’t really even like Bush Senior, really.
But it was all a really slick LIE.
Here’s Chris Matthews, in full leg tingle mode, beaming, snickering and laughing about how “Bush had NEVER SEEN A GROCERY SCANNER BEFORRRRRRE...!!!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akLjzTisZoI
(10 seconds)