Memo to the good people of Tulsa, Oklahoma: If you hope to have any chance of becoming the smallest city ever to host the summer Olympics, don't start your campaign by insulting the rest of the country.
Sadly, that's precisely what the committee organizing Tulsa's incredibly long-shot bid to capture the 2024 summer games has done. As the New York Times reported:

But Tulsa, its boosters argue, offers something that big-ticket American rivals like Los Angeles, Boston and Dallas can only dream of -- the vast frontier of America.
This part of the country produced Woody Guthrie and Jim Thorpe. Neon signs still glow along Route 66. J. Paul Getty made his first million in Tulsa nearly a century ago, and the city's Art Deco buildings have survived booms, busts and tornadoes. "The larger cities aren't truly representative of what the real America is," said Jennifer Jones of the Tulsa 2024 bid committee. "The real America is the midsize cities, and we want people to see America."

If that formulation sounds familiar, it should. Because claiming that the reddest of red state geographies constitute the supposed "real America" has been a pathetic Republican slander for years.
That mythology was on display during the 2008 election. Even before Rep. Robin Hayes (R-NC) said - and then denied saying - "liberals hate real Americans," the sound bite was firmly established as a GOP talking point. A few days earlier, McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer explained that northern Virginia was not the "real Virginia." While John McCain declared western Pennsylvania to be "the most God-loving, most patriotic part of America," his GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin amplified on the point during an event in North Carolina:

"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."

Palin later apologized for suggesting that other parts of the country are less patriotic or less American. But that misstep didn't stop her GOP allies from continuing their rhetorical. In 2012, Mitt Romney repeatedly used the term "extraordinarily foreign" to describe President Obama while proclaiming he himself came from "the real streets of America." Ignoring the demographic changes sweeping the United States, Romney even more than McCain was blind-sided by the increasingly metropolitan and minority makeup of the nation he would lead. As the Daily Beast helpfully explained after the voters truly unskewed the Republicans' supposedly unskewed polls:

The so-called Real America--the America the ultraconservatives like to imagine we live in--is now a Minority America. That is quantifiable. Meanwhile, the America that achieved a majority on Tuesday is something bigger. More inclusive. More progressive. More modern. It is the real Real America, like it or not.

And like it or not, anyone claiming monopoly ownership of the real America doesn't have a bright future in the United States. Especially if, like the nice people in Tulsa, they want to represent all of us in 2024.