I've just emerged from the bathroom from my last trip to Denny's (Grandpa likes it), and what doth pop up on my monitor but yet another zeitgeist-capturing promotion from the creative geniuses in their creative lair at Denny's. Not content to jump the indie rock train, they've hopped aboard the Straight Talk/Change Express for the clichéd roll-it-out-every-four-years election promo. Wow. Their powers of imagination make Salvador Dali look like George Costanza. 

Let's peer in on the lair:

Ad Wizard: Hey Bob, have you heard of this new YouTube thingy? All the kids do it! Let's get them to go to our competitors, buy our competitors' fake food and compare it to our real food!  Man, I can see it now. We're gonna flatten 'em like a chicken-fried steak!"

[Cue Larry the Cable Guy look-alike.]

Larry look-alike: See this greasy hash-brown cake from Mickey D's? Now think of that last plate of greasy hash browns you had at Denny's. Denny's is waaaaaay better! They're real potatoes.* And the bacon on your Jack in the Box biscuit? NO WAY did that come from a real pig. Denny's has their own organic, sustainable pig farm right out in back where they're carving off slabs of fresh bacon to go with those dry-as-a-bone scrambled eggs and day-old white-bread toast. Now that's real food!

[Larry look-alike exits stage left, headed for the bathroom. Fade to black.] 

Ad Wizard: Bob, is that a doozy or what? We just smoked the competition like a cheap cigar! How fast can we get this promo live?

Now if Bob were less worried about his gig in the current economy, he would have shot this clichéd promo down before his wingman could say, "Let's light this candle." Unfortunately, it appears Bob's finger is still glued to the trigger, and Denny's is still glued to the notion that they are serving quality food that's a true step up from fast food just because you sit down in one of their aquamarine booths to eat it. Is this the same way we American citizens are supposed to believe that everything a Presidential candidate utters on the stump is real because he's standing at a lectern? Whoever drew the comparison between food and candidates and how real they are should be sentenced to watch McCain speak to an NAACP meeting until they cringe themselves to death.

Until Denny's starts making its biscuits from scratch, putting something other than month-old butter pats in that bowl on the table next to those little foil Smuckers containers, the "restaurant" chain should focus on what it does best: serving cheap, filling, trucked-in eats to those who have trucked in to eat. Don't raise expectations for those who have none in the first place. That's what Presidential candidates do.

*P.S. If McD's does one thing right, it's potatoes. And as they're probably the largest customer of potato producers on earth, I'm guessing they get decent product. Just my two cents.