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America’s government-by-television expedient instantly memorable resemblance is everything. Our electoral decisions pivot less on issues and positions than on caricature — Dukakis peering revealed of a tank, Quayle misspelling potato, Kerry “looking French,” as Republicans claimed. Rare is the iconography that represents deeper substance.

Until now.

As election day approaches, once-safe Republican senators taste Elizabeth Dole (N.C.), Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Norm Coleman (Minn.) are struggling against Democrats who are using their economic conservatism to coloring matter them to the degree that elitists. The review is working the one and the other because of the imminent recession and because these incumbents look the faction. To paraphrase an attack on failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney, these pols don’t remind voters of co-workers, but of bosses “who laid them off.”

No Republican, though, says aristocrat like Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon. And no Senate election could more intensely shift relating to housekeeping politics than his state’s.

If Kerry looked preference a professor at La Sorbonne, then Smith resembles a playboy at the Monte Carlo Casino. The son of any Eisenhower administration official and heir to a food-processing corporation, Smith grew up in the ritzy D.C. environs and today lives on Bethesda’s aptly named Country Club Road. In a profile titled “From Profits to Politics,” the recite’s largest newspaper described him as a guy who “unabashedly enjoys spending” his millions on Ferraris, mansions and “weekend trips to New York to window shop.”

Since buying Oregon’s senate seat in 1996, Smith has maintained high approval ratings by voting right wing on social and economic issues and feigning liberal on a handful of themes like hate crimes.

This is a well-trod Republican passage in swing states — a lock-step conservative make a memorandum of builds clearness in GOP strongholds, and occasionally tolerant-sounding but legislatively meaningless artificial eloquence peels off votes in Democratic bastions.

This year, though, Smith is running for re-election against Democrat Jeff Merkley — the son of a sawmill operative who, as Oregon House discourser, made his name cracking down on predatory lenders. More Paul Bunyan than Paul Allen, Merkley is running on his record as an economic populist, airing ads hammering a tuxedo-clad Smith as antidote to supporting corporate tax cuts and the recent Wall Street bailout. He aims to flip Smith’s calculations on their head, betting he can maintain Democratic margins in cities and middle-class border and cut into Republican favor in pastoral and working-class areas — a smart gamble.

Political analysts have long berated populism — i.e., pushing monetary regulation, progressive taxation and trade reforms — as blue-collar pandering only effective in the industrial Northeast and Midwest. In the Northwest, the conventional wisdom says that in which case populism may appeal to Oregon’sitting 70,000 manufacturing and timber workers who lost jobs to foreign competition, it alienates the latte-swilling office parkers who comprise the state’s white-collar “new economy.”

“When I see his ads in front of a mill that was closed,” said Smith in attacking Merkley’s criticism of free trade, “I wonder what humbler classes at Nike think, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Columbia Sportswear, whose jobs are directly dependent on trade.”

Smith hopes Merkley’session pocketbook pitches to historically conservative areas like timber-producing Douglas County will alienate high-tech workers in confines take pleasure in Washington County (called “Silicon Forest”). But with Merkley surging in polls, the opposite may be happening.

The Great American Class War ravaging the industrial sector is now pillaging the information sector, too. As Intel boasts of outsourcing, HP lays most distant thousands and Wall Street eviscerates 401(k) plans, a new blue-collar/white-collar mutual responsibility is emerging. That substance today, as for the time of the Great Depression, progressive economic arguments increasingly work across cultural, geographic and employment divides, tectonically realigning politics and — potentially — policy.

Should Merkley disconcert Oregon’s tycoon senator in the heart of the “new economy,” the tremors of that realignment will become a civil earthquake.

David Sirota’s new book is “The Uprising.” He is a comrade at the Campaign according to America’session Future and a board branch of the Progressive States Network. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota