The news that Senator Kerry’s name is on a list of potential running mates that Senator Obama is circulating on Capitol Hill, according to NBC News, was enough to get our attention. Maybe they meant the president of the New School, Robert Kerrey? Both men are decorated combat veterans of Vietnam that would bring Mr. Obama some of the national security heft he is apparently seeking in a vice presidential candidate. No, according to a report in yesterday’s New York Times, “During the course of two long dinners at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington this year and last, Mr. Obama sought the advice of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.”

Ah, the Democrats, the party of the working man, where the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, lives in the Ritz-Carlton, and when the party’s two presidential nominees want to go out for dinner, they do it not over beer and burgers or Chinese food, but at the Four Seasons Hotel, where the dinner menu includes foie gras and a vodka-caviar gelée. What did they talk about? Whether Mr. Kerry’s Yale education was better than the one Mr. Obama got at Columbia and Harvard Law School? How Mr. Kerry dealt with the National Journal ranking as America’s most liberal senator, a mantle that was later assumed by Mr. Obama? How Mr. Obama can end the Iraq War with the same sort of retreat that Mr. Kerry precipitated in Vietnam? How Mr. Kerry’s alienation from Catholicism over abortion rights is similar to Mr. Obama’s problem with Trinity United?

If Mr. Obama hasn’t realized that a majority of Americans consider Mr. Kerry to be insufferable and many a phony more suited to being president of France than of America, he deserves the Massachusetts senator as a running mate. Given Mr. Obama’s recent propensity for policy pirouettes, maybe he’d be a perfect match with the senator famous for being for funding the troops in Iraq before he voted against it. What a team. What a party. With this ticket the Republicans could just let the television late-night talk show joke-writers run the campaign against the Democrats. That’s not to say there isn’t a tradition of wealthy, patrician presidential candidates from the Democratic Party winning support from working-class Americans. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the best example. But for a candidate like Mr. Obama, who lost white blue-collar voters in the primary to Senator Clinton, to be considering Mr. Kerry of Nantucket, Georgetown, and Beacon Hill as a running mate over dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington — well, we wouldn’t want to make too much of it, but we wouldn’t want to make too little of it, either.