Googling the combination of “small town” with Sarah Palin reveals an astonishing number of hits. One such hit comes from columnist, Mike Nichols, who covered Sarah Palin’s first campaign stop in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

All you had to do was look around as Sarah Palin took the stage on America’s quintessential small town Main St. Friday to know she has tapped into something much of this country never knew, or somehow forgot, existed.

Just to her right — toward the steeple of Cedarburg’s St. Francis Borgia Church — was a huge, blue sign held up by hockey gloves used, till now, only to shoot pucks and pad knuckles:

“Pro-life Hockey Moms 4 Palin,” it proclaimed.

Out in front, down Columbia Road toward the historic mill and Cedar Creek, was another: “Read my Lip-stick.”

Nichols was clearing moved by the event and went into an assessment of what he found to be a phenomena of sorts.

She is helping do away with the idea that people who are pro-life are somehow in denial about teen pregnancy — the despicable notion, too, that it is somehow a curse to be pregnant with a child with a disability.

She has tapped into cultural crosscurrents that never had names before and is burying old clichés all at the same time.

Another link brought me to ia USN&WR editorial by Andrew M. Langer titled, “Sarah Palin, Small-Town America, and the Democrats Ongoing Arrogance Problem.”

The Democratic Party is an urban one, focused largely on urban problems and constituencies.

But in order to win in 2008, Democratic leaders knew that they needed to woo small-town America. The time was ripe, the theory went, with an unpopular president, an unpopular Congress, and a Republican Party that had somehow lost its way. So the Democratic machine went to work, bringing Barack Obama to places like Montana, hoping that he could build on that dissatisfaction and show that the Democratic Party cares about Main Streets across the U.S.A., no matter how rural or sparsely populated.

Which is why the attack on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and her prior experience of being the mayor of a town of 9,000, is both strange and troubling. The 2000 and 2004 electoral maps show, and political experience confirms, that America is a place of small towns. So casting aspersions on those who live and govern in Small-Town America seems to be, well, a stupid way of courting those voters.

Obama’s contempt for small-town America is well known in his snide remark about small towner’s God, guns and distate for others unlike them.

Is Sarah Palin’s authentic American story and presence surpassing the airy rhetoric from Obama’s march through Democrat primaries and caucuses? Is it because his mantra of change would eventually ring hollow and its deliverer be upstaged by those whom had actually, well, delivered actual change? Does a combination of the shallow Obama candidacy with the usual Democrat election year message of class warfare play weakly to small-town values?

Rhetorical questions are meant to prompt thought and discussion. They are not meant to be answered in the absolute. But these are an overview of what will decide the election.

Democrats are putting all their eggs in the same baskets again at crunch time to appeal to their base. Maybe even the most conservative voters are seeing that the instrument of their own value set in the Republican Party is actually being led by those whom actually have demonstrated they are not afraid to…… change back to small town values.

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