For years I've found it interesting that the two presidents who guided post WWII America were from small towns about 150 miles apart.

Harry Truman and Dwight David Eisenhower were both from rural heartland America. Both were interested in the world and America's place in it. By the time Truman graduated high school, he had read all 2,000 books in the Independence library. His political support came from the corrupt Pendergast family in Kansas City, although there is no evidence Truman was anything other than a stand-up guy.

In 1919, during a time of widespread anti-semitism, Harry Truman's business partner was a Jewish man by the name of Eddie Jacobson. Years later, Truman would be the first American president who addressed the NAACP in person, in spite of the fact that Truman's own mother held a fierce grudge over the civil war and refused to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom when she visited Washington.

FDR and Truman barely knew one another, and Roosevelt failed to inform his vice president on vital programs such as the Manhattan Project. Because he was a voracious reader, Truman was able to not only bring himself current, but also comprehend the ramifications of what was going on.

Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander in WWII. The man who out smarted the efficient German war machine. As far as major events of the 20th Century, it's hard to beat. Yet Eisenhower is rarely cited by Republicans these days. Maybe it's due to the remarks in his final speech as president warning Americans of the political military industrial complex, or because he's the last president that had a balanced policy in the mid-east. Older Egyptians remember when Eisenhower went to the U.N. to call back British, French, and Israeli forces from the Suez Canal.

When I visited the Eisenhower museum a couple of years ago, I was struck by one of his quotes near the exit: If all that Americans want is security, then they can go to prison.

This morning when I got online, one of the top stories in Wired was about Jack Kilby, a man from my small hometown, Great Bend, Kansas, who, on this day in 1958, showed his colleagues at Texas Instruments his new invention - the integrated circuit. He's largely responsible for us to be able to communicate like this.

I know there are small towns across this country who can point out similar stories from their own history. So, what is wrong with small-town America in 2008?

Loved your post, and it's a damn good question that bears repeating:

Why doesn't anyone ever complain that McCain & co "just don't get" well-educated, cosmopolitan, urban voters?

I had an interesting exchange with another Salon poster, pseudonymouslawyer over the weekend who made an excellent point which also bears repeating:

Agreed on McCain as economic simpleton. I wish someone would ask him, for example, how he can have anything remotely resembling an understanding of the challenges facing the American economy (and in particular the challenges facing small business) given that he doesn't know how to use a computer or the internet, by his own admission. How can he possibly have a grasp of the way shit works and what the problems are if he hasn't even had the rudimentary experience of, say, buying a book on Amazon? Yet it is entirely possible that we will wind up with a man without the experience of rowing a dinghy at the helm of the ship of state, as it were. It boggles the mind. I have a hard time imagining Gramm getting confirmed as anything in a hypothetical McCain cabinet given his massive fuck-up ("a nation of whiners") on the campaign and where UBS is at at the moment. Of course, we wound up with plenty of doozeys with Bush 43 (Aschroft and Gonzales leap to mind), so I guess I won't be shocked if Secretary Gramm happens.

Today, the Obama campaign has an ad running addressing McCain's lack of knowledge about the internet and how he "doesn't get it".

It isn't all about guns, gays, and god.

I think the computer/internet ad is perfectly legitimate. Forget about asking Palin about the connection between copyright and trade policy, John McCain couldn't answer that question. And if we've given up our manufacturing base to become a tech society, then we better stay on the bleeding edge, hadn't we?

This is the opposite of teaching creationism. Do you think modernity is commodity we only need to export to the areas of the world breeding terroism? This is where we're going to get our asses kicked by emerging nations if we fall for Republican's making social conservatism top priority. It isn't even priority number two.

Even if we stay away from family issues and lipstick, we're still dealing with McCain/Palin believing that reforming Washington is what is sorely needed. The fact that the Bush administration is no more is reform enough. Yeah, we need to watch government earmarks (apparently keeping a closer eye on Alaska is a good start), but the fact that McCain/Palin continue to peddle the motto "drill, baby, drill" tells me the status quo has nothing to fear from McCain/Palin. They're both lying about their mavericky-reforming resumes too much as it is.

Drilling for oil by multinational corporations doesn't make it OUR oil. It's sold on the open market just like everybody else's oil. Therefore, you'll get to pay through the nose for American oil. And, by all accounts, there isn't enough of it to make any difference, anyway.

We have to go big into new technologies and McCain is exactly the wrong guy for this. Oil is safe and anything new is going to look like government pork to him.

Right now, we need to build and create things more than reform them.

Because abortion -- the real target of Whoopi's question -- is not mentioned in the constitution

Abortion isn't mentioned in the Bible, either.