So which is it? Hillary Clinton, on the stump, telling voters she cares about the little guy, or Hillary Clinton at an intimate gathering that charges $50,000 per plate? As a subhed in Wednesday's Washington Post put it, "High-dollar fundraisers contrast with promise to help middle class."

Post reporters Matea Gold and John Wagner go on to detail a Clinton event in Cape Cod last Sunday at the home of Democratic activist Elaine Schuster. "The price of entry to see Hillary Clinton on Sunday evening was $50,000 per person, a sum that got you an al fresco meal of tomato and mozzarella salad, lobster, strawberry shortcake and an intimate conversation with the possible next president of the United States." With 28 guests in attendance, the candidate netted $1.4 million.

(It's ironic, since the lobster was once deemed a low-class meal. As David Foster Wallace pointed out in his essay, "Consider the Lobster," "Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.")

But if Clinton's image meisters are at all concerned about the appearance of their candidate as a one-percenter rubbing elbows with the Wall Street elite while claiming to defend the interests of the little guy, they should offer more reasonable fundraisers with a lighter menu.

Now let's assume, for $50,000, the lobster is already cracked, with butter at the ready. If it's anything less—anything requiring bibs and greased hands breaking apart tails and claws with lobster juice splattering here and there—then you're really getting ripped off. But what can be served at, say, a $25,000 a plate dinner? Shrimp, maybe? Or perhaps crab?

I've got a guy who works in the seafood distribution business up in Connecticut. He's worked up there all his life and at one point even fished out there like George Clooney in The Perfect Storm. It's a hard business, but oh, to reach the Flemish Cap! In any event, my guy (who amazingly does not eat seafood) says there is definitely a hierarchy when it comes to sales: "Lobster is just about the priciest, or one of the priciest seafoods out there," not counting "the exotic stuff" and in terms of price it can be occasionally outdone by crab legs; large shrimp are next, as well as oysters and clams—whole belly Ipswich are a huge hit—and on down to the less pricey fish like cod and scrod.

The Clinton campaign needs to understand there are so many supporters out there who want to meet the candidate, press her flesh, and share their concerns—not every event has to be a lobster bake. For $15,000 a person, they can hold old-fashioned clam bakes and even shad bakes. Shad, in fact, are what author John McPhee termed "the founding fish" (the title of his book). It's a seminal part of our history. As McPhee so eloquently wrote, "The first time I had seen sexual secretions expressed from the bodies of captured shad…" In any event, shad is doable.

And for "the little guy," why not scrod-and-cod meet-and-greets for $10,000 a pop? My seafood man tells me both fish are selling at very reasonable rates of anywhere "between $5 and $9 a pound right now, domestic, Canadian, Icelandic—there's all different shapes and sizes and countries of origin." And what better way to show your Democratic bona fides than by having voters get scrod with Hillary Clinton?

(Yes, it's an old joke told in many variations. But here's how William Safire told it in How Not to Write: "Tourist seeking a fish restaurant in Boston climbs into a taxicab and says to the cabbie, 'Say, do you know where I can get scrod?' Cabbie replies admiringly: 'Mister, I've been asked that a thousand times, but never before in the pluperfect subjunctive.'")