But after all the scandals, shenanigans and excessive spin of intervening years, Mr. Ford shines through as a man of honor, decency and plain talk, qualities that look good in the rear-view mirror of history.
President Bush called him "a man of deep convictions" and "a plain-spoken fellow who did the best for his state and for his country," while the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose presidential campaigns Mr. Wellstone supported, described him as "the voice of conscience in the U.S. Senate and the catalyst of the coalition of hope".
Labour has since claimed that the footage shows Farage "poses as a man of the people" but it is now "plain for all to see that a vote for Ukip is a vote for the privatisation of the NHS".
While searching a bus, they singled out a man, in plain clothes, whom they suspected of belonging to the Syrian military.
She notices her belated preference for black men as a matter of plain fact, explicable partly because a lover who is "white and well-bred" was a "status symbol" for some black men: "Deplorable although I can't help being grateful for it".
Miró, who first came to Paris in 1920, when he was twenty-six, plainly enjoyed indulging in the slash-and-burn attitudinizing of the avant-garde, despite being essentially a plain man, of equable temperament.
The researchers who have assiduously charted his life, spending years in Afghanistan's south and interviewing his companions, say that he was a plain man of little learning with no sophisticated ideas about the world.
Flann O'Brien reminded us that "A pint of plain is your only man".
"When money's tight and hard to get And your horse has also ran When all you have is a heap of debt A pint of plain is your only man" Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939 Jem Casey, Flann O'Brien's poet of the proletariat, sends a cast of fictional scoundrels into near religious raptures with his rhyme The Workman's Friend, a frill-free ode to plain porter.
