These are epic times, so let’s take a look at two very insipid campaign ads in battleground CD7, which early appear to be tripping over each other in a quest for bipartisan banality.

Even as they attempt to supposedly define a narrative, they adhere so reverently to the same sphere of safety, they seem suspended in an equally ghoulish space.

In the interest of softening the blow for inevitably prickly politicians and their handlers, let us at the outset note that we are not attacking these two magnificent guys personally, but rather highlighting the strangely disconnected persona each campaign attempts to project in an attempt to plug a “real guy” into your living room.

First, let’s look at Tom Malinowski’s ad.

At his worst, the incumbent Democratic congressman’s seen as a creature of the bureaucracy who doesn’t really live here. So what we get is a dungarees-clad dude seen in his garage, as if he was just under the hood of a car, pounding nails or pumping a harley tire.

As he talks about working and getting things done, he straddles a chair, as if this posture supposedly conveys a man who means business.

It’s oddly dislocated, and seems to have the reverse effect of presenting someone who’s sitting down on the job. As for the candidate’s attire, the only wonder is why they didn’t go ahead and hang a red bandana from his back pocket.

Then there’s that ad by Republican challenger Tom Kean, Jr.

What we get here is the same guy who ran for federal office twice before, only now he seems slower and less sure of himself, as if the processes of past failed efforts have left him less eager to even act the part of an engaged participant in his own run for congress; as if the furnaces of fortune have melted the wax of will into a solemn, static and somewhat gloomy figure.

Kean, Jr. – the version of himself in the ad – tiredly and unconvincingly recites a few things he’s supposedly done, and inevitably stands uncomfortably in the proximity of apparently real people, before the final shot features him playing cards with his family just after the voice-over talks about him “working for all of us.”

This is a politician persona in the ad who is so dislocated, he evidently thinks working hard is playing cards.