Good Question (And Good Answer)

Why is Alaska the "real America" and Hawaii not? Timothy Noah for Slate answers.

"But if it's really true, as Palin said in the debate, that Americans are tired of 'constantly looking backwards,' then perhaps it's time we noticed that, as Rachael Larimore points out in Slate's 'XX Factor' blog, 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in metropolitan areas. We city-dwellers make no claim to being more "authentically American" than Alaskans or the inhabitants of any of this country's many other big open spaces. But we are, by dispassionate numerical reckoning, more typical. And while most people probably don't think of Hawaii as an urban state, 70 percent of its 1.3 million inhabitants live in and around Honolulu, the state's biggest city. In Alaska, by contrast, only 42 percent of its 670,000 inhabitants live in and around Anchorage, that state's biggest city. So if either of the last two states admitted to the union has any claim to being more characteristic of the nation as a whole, it's Hawaii, not Alaska."