Even Don Draper, the fictional advertising executive played by Jon Hamm on "Mad Men," couldn't salvage Microsoft's ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

It was not a pretty sight. The former sitcom star and the world's richest software developer ambled through the mystifying TV spots like Vladimir and Estragon on the lam from "Waiting for Godot." The ads, the first wave of a campaign to rehabilitate Windows, were derided by computer geeks and normal people alike. Microsoft pulled the plug this week (though claiming that was their plan all along).

In the first spot, the two men -- who could easily buy entire ZIP codes with the cash they had in their pockets that day -- fake familiarity with downscale shopping at a discount shoe store. In the second, the celebrities, bunking with an ordinary family in a suburban split-level, find themselves commenting on the incongruity of it all:

Gates: "Why are we doing this?"

Seinfeld: "Why, Bill? Because as we discussed, you and I are a little out of it. You're in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mothership. I've got so many cars, I get stuck in my own traffic. We need to connect with real people."

(The resident grandmother wanders by their bedroom door wailing: "Who took my teeth out of the freezer?")

Seinfeld [pointing to her]: "That's real!"

Gates [nodding]: "Hmmm. I felt that."

If the spots are supposed to be an answer to Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign, it was a miserable failure. Bill Gates is no John Hodgman, though Jerry Seinfeld has a lot in common with the smug, black-attired Mac guy in the ads.

For his trouble, Mr. Seinfeld pocketed a cool $10 million for writing the most baffling commercials in a generation. I know a lot of pretentious people, and no one has been able to explain to me what's going on in these spots.

In many ways, the absurdity of two gazillionaires shopping at a discount shoe outlet is reminiscent of the McCain campaign's faux populism of recent weeks.

Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin are very much like Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld -- except the latter are keenly aware how phony their pose as mall rats looks to others.

Meanwhile, the Republican presidential ticket doesn't care how inauthentic they sound as long as their stump speech helps them "connect with real people."

So John McCain hits the campaign trail every day, sounding increasingly like actor Wallace Shawn doing a really bad Huey Long imitation.

It's clear that being a man of the people doesn't come naturally to Mr. McCain. Even as storied financial institutions began crashing and burning like the Hindenburg all over Wall Street, John McCain stuck to his assessment that the "fundamentals of the economy" were sound.

When the post-convention bounce that tied the two campaigns suddenly evaporated, Mr. McCain abandoned his relentlessly optimistic line about the economy.

Now we're supposed to believe that the "fundamentals" he's been referring to all along is really a metaphor for the humble American worker -- not the market. He assures us he would never say that the "fundamentals" of American capitalism are sound.

As if to prove John McCain's bona fides as the kind of man an unemployed steel worker in Ohio could have a beer with, the campaign rolled out a prominent Hillary supporter who defected to the Republicans -- Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

Lady Rothschild, a member in good standing of the "Let 'em eat cake" wing of the Democratic Party, told an incredulous Campbell Brown on CNN that she couldn't support Barack Obama because he is "elitist."

"So, you have to understand how ridiculous this seems to a lot of people," Ms. Brown said. "You're a Rothschild. You're married to a billionaire. You were a millionaire before you married him. You're a jetsetter. You live between New York and London. And yet, you're calling Barack Obama an elitist. Are you not a member of the elite?"

Lady Rothschild, after noting her middle-class upbringing in New Jersey, insisted that Barack Obama was a divisive figure who promulgated class warfare and thinks he's "grander than the rest of us." She supports Mr. McCain because he's a champion of the middle class and that he and Sarah Palin "are the great Americans."

For a second, I thought I was watching another one of Jerry Seinfeld's maddeningly opaque Microsoft commercials.