Via Sullivan, Dave Weigel over at the Washington Independent makes the exact point we’ve been making ’round these parts:

This is fascinating. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) lost the presidency with 48.3 percent of the vote, and no one seriously suggested that they represented “real Americans” or anything else. As Ben Smith reported after the election, at least 79 percent of Americans now live in urban areas; the people with whose opinion Brzezinski is so concerned represent a demographic and political fringe. Famously, the county in North Carolina that Sarah Palin pegged as an outpost of “real America” went for Barack Obama over John McCain, by 18 points.

By every metric, Palin is one of the less popular Republican politicians on the national stage: her ticket even carried less of the vote in Alaska (59.4 percent) than the Bush/Cheney ticket carred in 2004 (61.1 percent). And yet mainstream pundits insists that she represents more of the country than the people who won the 2008 election. It’s quite extraordinary.

But “real,” in this sense to these people, means somehow more American. Only problem is, the Palinites don’t get to decide what “more American” means and doesn’t.