Time Magazine's Joe Klein writes today about the "myth of America." Actually, it's more the myth of rural America, of good people living in small towns sprinkled across the countryside. How Klein knows people believe in this myth is hard to know, but.... "Except that's not really true," Klein writes. "We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But (Sarah) Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins."

Klein says this myth is a product of Reagan Republicanism made more important this year by the race of the Democratic nominee. "Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized," Klein writes. Obama, in fact, represents the way of life that "displaced Main Street America." How could one guy know so much, a reader might ask?

Anyway, Democrats lack a good myth, Klein contends. And small town Americans are confused, he laments. He writes (in a final bit of condescension meant to be analysis): "They live in a place...where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day." Jeez....