I hail from a relatively small town in central Illinois: Mattoon, population 18,368. Let me be clear: We Midwesterners don’t all value the simple life of hard work and faith and family and county fairs and diners and farming and mom-and-pop stores. Some of us do! And there are good reasons to aspire to those ideals. But using our homes and lives in this extraordinarily broad way to advance your own political career is insulting. Pandering to an assumed base of gun-loving, Republican Christians in the Midwest feels just as presumptuous as assuming “urban areas” will vote only for Democrats. I know an awful lot of folks from my hometown who voted for Barack Obama and also happen to enjoy hunting. We all make up multitudes.

Praising middle America is often how politicians let themselves off the hook of hearing out the problems affecting Midwesterners once elected, too. Take President Obama’s frequent visits to city high schools and middle schools, where he touts his education reform goals and talks about the need for inner-city students to have access to the better schools so geographically close but educationally far away. He’s right. But what about the Midwest students who attend the only high school for 30 miles in any direction? It’s a tougher trip, a less obvious photo op. But the chances of those students landing anywhere other than the local community college feel as frustratingly palpable to them and their parents as their big-city counterparts.