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Not only is Barack Obama the first African-American to win the presidency, the Chicagoan also is the first winning candidate in more than a century to openly adopt a Big City ethos.

One has to go back to Teddy Roosevelt, who was born in Manhattan and once served as New York City police commissioner, to find a president who unabashedly identified himself with the city.

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Why so long, in a country that has had an urban majority since 1920? An idealized view of the small town and a profound mistrust of all things urban are long-lingering features of the American political landscape. And even when a candidate really is a creature of the city, he swaddles himself in a rural aura.

Ronald Reagan was clearly at home in Hollywood, but he milked his Dixon, Ill., roots with the skill of the consummate political actor he was.

George H.W. Bush was a scion of the East Coast establishment but reinvented himself as an oilman from Midland, Texas. His eldest son took us a step deeper into the mythology of Texas, choosing a ranch in Crawford (pop. 705) as the stage for his brand of homespun Republicanism.

John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt were more nuanced political personalities.

“One thinks of the FDR coalition as being an urban coalition, but FDR himself felt more comfortable with the countryside,” said presidential historian William Leuchtenburg, author of several biographies of Roosevelt. “He never presented himself as a big city person. He owned land in Warm Springs [Ga.] and dabbled in experimental farming.”

Kennedy’s political DNA was Boston Irish, but when he began his quest for the presidency, the image he projected was of sailboats and walking on the wind-swept beaches of Cape Cod.

Kennedy may have epitomized urbane East Coast cosmopolitanism, “but you can be urbane without being urban. You don’t think of JFK as urban,” said Richard Norton Smith, author of several presidential biographies and former director of four presidential libraries.

The Obama-McCain contest offered the sharpest urban-rural political schism since 1928, when Al Smith, a son of Manhattan’s teeming Lower East Side, was trounced by Herbert Hoover, of West Branch, Iowa.

“Smith’s defeat is generally attributed to his being a Catholic,” Leuchtenburg said. “But you have to look at the total package—the Catholicism, the New York City accent, his [relaxed] stand on Prohibition. All of this wrapped together was something the country was not ready for.”

GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, from Wasilla, Alaska, set the tone for this year’s campaign with her convention speech.

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity,” she said, borrowing the words from Westbrook Pegler, a Depression-era newspaper columnist (and for a few years a Tribune sportswriter). On the stump, John McCain and Palin repeatedly derided Obama as a “Chicago politician.” Their audiences needed no further explication.

The idealized myth of a small-town America persists despite demographic reality. According to the last census, 79 percent of Americans live in urban areas. The last time the U.S. had a rural majority was in 1910.

So why do we cling to this image of America that disappeared with the Model T?

“Traditionally, in American culture, there is a mythology that small-town and rural America have a hammerlock on virtue,” Richard Norton Smith said.

Smith traces our sentimentality for the small town back to the nation’s founding and the argument between the Federalist camp, led by Alexander Hamilton, and the anti-Federalists, whose champion was Thomas Jefferson.

Hamilton spoke for the emerging urban mercantile class in the northeastern cities that wanted a strong centralized government and banking system; Jefferson identified with rural and agrarian values of the South.

Obama is nothing if not urban. He was, of course, born and raised in Hawaii, but as an adult he chose to adopt Chicago as his identity and to embrace the rhythms, recreations, cadences and culture of the American city.

But Obama has been careful not to neglect the political reality of the Jeffersonian myth. The South Side may be home, but throughout the campaign he paid repeated homage to the Kansas roots of his mother and her family. No accident that his 30-minute infomercial opened with a Reaganesque scene of amber waves of grain.

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