I live in a city in Massachusetts; a particularly lovely state where something called Martha Coakley is running for governor. Last week, she came to my poverty-stricken, post-industrial heroin town and she dropped into the local diner. It's a real diner, chrome, looks like a railroad car. I live about four blocks from the diner, and I eat here with some frequency. Try the corned beef hash.

Maybe 20 years ago, I was in the same diner with Ted Kennedy, covering the portly liberal's attempt to connect with the working class. Kennedy, by the way, always took very small steps — little tiny steps, like an old lady on an icy sidewalk.

As a working reporter, I've been in that diner with state reps., gubernatorial candidates, guys running for attorney general and every form of political humanity that can be crammed into a blue suit or non-provocative, just-at-the-knee navy blue skirt.

A couple weeks ago, on a non-political morning, I slid into the diner for a plate of scrambled eggs. In the parking lot, a street guy they call "Toad" hit me for some change. I gave him 35 cents, all the silver I was carrying.

Me and Toad, we sometimes wonder why everybody running for office comes to the diner. Toad sleeps in the park so doesn't have a television. But if he did, he'd see candidates go to diners everywhere in America.

Why, oh why? It's a nice diner, the one near my house, but it isn't the best place to get to know my city. For one thing, there's a little park two blocks from the diner where you could get to know Toad and view his domestic arrangements in some tall brush the city is too damn poor to mow.

Politicians go to the diner because it's always 1963 in there — back in the safe times. It's as though they expect to meet a strapping World War II vet with a factory paycheck in his pocket, a union card in his wallet, steel mill dirt on his hands and a wife and three kids at home in his little bungalow.

And the photographers from the dying newspapers take their pictures and, for a moment, it looks like the photogs are wearing fedoras and neckties while the waitress, Midge, pats her bobbed hair back into place and lights up a Camel, even as a truck driver at the counter looks her up and down and says, "Say, Midge, you sure are some kind of tomato."

Politicians have fantasies, too, and not all of them involve posting naked selfies on the Internet. In their shy, secret hearts, they long for that uncomplicated diner world, far from the screeching tea party and the double-digit unemployment and the tatted up welfare moms and the school shootings and the legless vets just home from Kabul. They visit the diner to pretend they're in a world where their job could be done by anyone who could get a bridge built, march in a parade or help defeat polio.

And then they go out into the world they've made and the diner slips away like the smell of non-filter cigarette smoke.

It's a little cold tonight. I hope Toad got drunk enough to get a good night's sleep.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com