In the days leading to the 2004 Iowa caucus, a group called “Club for Growth” went after Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean with an advertisement in which paid actors said:

“Howard Dean can take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”

It was contemptuous stereotyping. Sort of like what Barack Obama did last month.

Obama is catching heat for telling a fund-raising audience that small-town voters in Pennsylvania are “bitter” over job losses and “cling” to guns and religion as a result. It was stereotypical and condescending, but it’s a tactic applied across the political spectrum. For years, conservatives have heaped stereotypical contempt upon people who don’t fit the rural, small- or medium-town, heartland voter profile. There may be a subtle difference between condescension and contempt, but Republicans have mastered the art of winning with crude regional and cultural stereotypes. Let me count the ways:

* The transformation of words like Massachusetts, Vermont and San Francisco into epithets. In 2004, President Bush told a campaign audience in Michigan that John Kerry's proposal for $2.2 trillion in new spending is “a lot even for somebody from Massachusetts,” and said Kerry's proposal to increase taxes on the rich was “the kind of promise a politician from Massachusetts usually keeps.” Conservatives also love to kick around “San Francisco values.” Right after the 2006 election, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert asked, “Do we really want Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco values leading the culture war?”

* Political columnist Michael Barone’s attempt to separate Obama and Hillary Clinton voters as “academics” vs. “Jacksonians.” Barone wrote, in effect, Obama wins voters in bad places (cities, academic enclaves and state capitols), while Clinton wins voters in good places (everywhere else). To buttress his point, he makes the following bizarre generalization:

“Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war. Economically, defense spending competes for the public-sector dollars that academics and public employees think are rightfully their own. More important, I think, warriors are competitors for the honor that academics and public employees think rightfully belongs to them. Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees.”

Forget the fact there are lots of academics (my father, for example), who went into teaching after serving in the miliary. Barone’s stereotyping is profoundly ugly and profoundly dumb.

* The late Wisconsin Gov. Lee Dreyfus’ description of Madison as “20 square miles surrounded by reality.” Translation: People who don’t live in Madison are better than people who live in Madison.

* A press release in which John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, attacked Obama’s comments and extolled his ”faith in the small town values that continue to make America great.” As opposed to urban values that don’t make America great.

It’s all part of a broader narrative -- those of us who live in the heartland and Bible Belt are more patriotic than you, more religiously observant than you, more self-reliant than you, more heterosexual than you, more down-to-earth than you and just plain better than you. It’s a form of elitist snobbery, except that it lacks Obama’s pity -- it’s pure, 100 percent disdain.

Republicans assume this will work against Obama because it has always worked in the past. Maybe it will, or maybe it won’t. Stereotypes, justified or not, can cut both ways. What’s to keep voters, especially first-time voters who are less likely to be white, rural or religious, from blaming the Bible-thumping, gun-toting, flag-waving, Fox News-watching, county music-listening, NASCAR-loving coalition for delivering a President who gave us $3.50 a gallon gas, $3.50 a gallon milk, a $3 trillion pre-emptive war and drove the economy into the ditch? Why not give the city dude a chance?

The problem, whether it’s the lazy sociology of Obama or Barone, Bush’s insult of Massachusetts or the Club for Growth’s insult of Vermont, is the instinct to put people in boxes. Not only does it ignore the ideological complexity of individual voters (there are, for example, individuals who oppose gun control and support gay marriage), but it also needlessly polarizes Americans in a time of economic and foreign policy turmoil. We’ve already elected one president whose promise to be a “uniter, not a divider” was a spectacular failure. Unfortunately, a lot of stereotypes across the political spectrum must die before a real uniter will be elected president.

Steve Rundio is the Perspective Page Editor of Tomah Newspapers.