Fascinating tangent from TPM Reader LB on the Whinyassistan thread …
This is kind of tangential to the rural-urban divide, but in Ohio the township-urban divide has been the hallmark of the Boehner-Kasich-Romney GOP as opposed to the Dole-Taft-Bush GOP.
The old Cincinnati GOP (Longworth, Taft, etc) were a paternalistic presence in Cincinnati (and, indeed, lived on opposite ends of 4th Street). They were philanthropists and played a role in the city’s cultural heritage. They were horrible, but they were Cincinnatians.
Boehner, on the other hand, was part of white flight into converted exurban sprawl (Kasich has a similar history) and basically never enters the city limits. He doesn’t go to cultural events (as a German-American, this is beyond the pale) and lives in a land with no sidewalks.
On top of that, Boehner and Kasich both come from township trustee positions, where having lower income taxes really did lead more people to move to your newly-converted subdivisions: it let them avoid paying Cincinnati income taxes. Most of Ohio’s gerrymandered GOP districts are exurban, not rural, and they elect former trustees who are too dumb to realize that running a township is nothing like running a state or a country.
And a lot of their policy can be explained by the belief that making life worse in the cities will make it easier to run a sprawl township.
