The day after Thanksgiving, as he sipped homemade moose chili at Skip’s Gun Shop in New Hampshire, Fred Thompson – until this spring, arguably known to more Americans for his role as the grizzled Manhattan district attorney on “Law & Order” than as a former U.S. Senator – attempted to distinguish himself from Rudy Giuliani. “He relates everything to New York City,” Thompson said. “Well, New York City is not emblematic of the rest of the country, I don’t think.”

Nice qualifier, that “I don’t think.” Necessary, too, because Thompson is, in fact, wrong about the ostensible gulf between New Yorkers and everyone else. Though surely that sentiment must have sounded convincing when drawled out in that honey-roasted, aged-to-perfection Southern accent.

Before disproving Thompson’s vague insult – laced as it is with fatuous faux-humility – it’s worth noting that the last time this was a legitimate point was in 1977, and the person making it was both a native New Yorker and a genius. (Woody Allen to Tony Roberts in “Annie Hall”: “Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.”)

Thirty years later, the only thing remotely relevant about Thompson’s notion is that, by positing New York City as some indeterminate, foreign “other,” the former senator from Tennessee subtly conjures “the rest of the country” as a homogenous bloc, peopled with the average, homespun, inoffensive, rural, God-fearing American citizen-. How flattering. Still, it’s potent imagery, tapping into Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian mythology; Jefferson believed that those who worked the land were exemplars of self-sufficiency, diviners of simple, irrefutable truths, and thus closest to God. These people, he thought, were the foundation of American Democracy.

It’s a meme that has yet to die (other first-world countries have fallen prey to the same notion: Australia still romanticizes their farmers, as does Canada). And so the constant, Sisyphean attempt to quantify the “average American” results in Time magazine’s recent cover story – a conceit the editors admitted to be “a mirage,” yet one accompanied by lots of pictures of stressed-out proles and old men in baseball caps. There’s also Kevin O’Keefe’s deathly earnest search for the same, outlined in his imaginatively-titled 2005 book “The Average American”; after a nation-wide quest, the author pseudo-scientifically anointed his old high school janitor. (Nothing patronizing about that.) And, of course, the evergreen: election-cycle reports, beloved by the nightly news, from a farm, or a plain, or a barren Main Street somewhere in the middle of the country, with “average Americans” (often white, often weather-beaten) representing all Americans on all matters of policy, foreign and domestic.

Yet the United States of America is, statistically, an urbanized nation. According to the 2003 Estimates of U.S. Urban Population by the Census Bureau, 80.6 percent of Americans live in cities and suburbs. Eleven of our major cities rank among the 55 major global centers, and three of those – Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York – are considered “alpha” global cities. New York City is the most populous city in the nation; New Jersey the most populous state. According to the latest government data, as of 2006, only 0.7 percent of the population – 2 million people, compared to NYC’s 8 million residents – was employed in agriculture. (Since the farm crisis of the mid-’80s, rural areas have suffered the flight of young people.)

In his new book “Microtrends,” Mark J. Penn – CEO of the p.r. firm Burson-Marsteller and Hillary Clinton‘s chief campaign strategist – identifies strains of American consumers, voters and identities (much as former direct-mailer Karl Rove did for George W. Bush). Penn credits himself with being the first to recognize the untapped voting bloc now known as “soccer moms” while working for Bill Clinton in 1996; he argues that as America spawns ever more fractured, specialized groups – Christian Zionists, High School Moguls, Newly Released Ex-Cons – demographic differences will become far more specific and internecine than, say, something like “New York City vs. the nation.”

Other statistics that corrode the imagery conjured by Thompson’s anti-sophisticate stance: Less than 10 percent of the country hunts. Less than 15 percent of the American electorate identifies themselves as members of the Christian right. The number of adults who identify as agnostics or atheists jumped 6.6 percent from 1990-2001. Half of Americans believe in gun control. In the past 40 years, the number of Americans who registered as independent has grown from one-quarter to one-third of the electorate. The most common person to file for bankruptcy is a white, fully-employed middle-class head of household. Just 11 percent of the country claims baseball – “America’s pastime” – to be its favorite sport, while 40 million Americans regularly log on to porn sites – over 10 times the amount who typically watch baseball. The Midwest has more children who are vegetarians (8 percent) than any other region in the nation. In a 2006 poll that asked Americans which religious group they felt most favorably towards, Jews won with a whopping 54 percent.

All of which renders Woody Allen’s barbed lament in “Annie Hall” even more hilarious, although now for reasons unintended: Such a rough, psycho-statistical profile of the American citizenry doesn’t sound that far afield from a Whole Foods-shopping, New Yorker-subscribing, Netflix-ing Manhattanite.

So: why? Why does cheap rhetoric like Thompson’s still work? And, tangentially, why is it that small states like Iowa (ranked 26th in population) and New Hampshire (46th) still disproportionately determine who will run for president? And aren’t the residents of those states in any way insulted by the sudden influx of obsequious, solicitous politicians and journalists wanting to know what they – as “real” Americans – think for just a few months every four years? Not to insult New Hampshire or Iowa, but Thompson implies that they and other small states are populated with hearty, wholesome Americans who serve as a corrective to irrationally superior, solipsistic New Yorkers.

This brand of pandering can’t sustain itself; the statistical data available about the way most Americans think, vote and live today contradicts and undermines such coarse comparisons. Still, as Thomas Frank pointed out in 2004’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” the idea of a binary America, divided into blue states and red states, with humble red states culturally oppressed by the haughty blue, sticks in the national psyche because it allows both sides to feel victimized while giving both sides a bogeyman. “The idea of a liberal elite is not intellectually robust,” Frank writes. “It’s never been enunciated with anything approaching scholarly rigor, it has been refuted countless times, and it falls apart under any sort of systematic scrutiny.”

Yet it is not scrutinized nearly often enough. Take 2004’s famous GOP ad excoriating Howard Dean, a mocking voiceover attempting to shame the Democratic candidate into taking his “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving . . . left-wing freak show back to Vermont.” Such rarefied East Coast tastes those are, what with the 6,010 Starbucks currently operating in the U.S., the 9,000 Japanese restaurants nationwide at last count (2005), and the U.S. outranking all other countries in sales for Volvo – a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Co. – that same year.

It’s the same kind of cynical attempt to amputate the electorate from what should be its true, common concern – corporate hegemony – that allowed John Kerry to be tarred as an aristo-liberal elitist for windsurfing, while George Bush availed himself of rugged photo ops on his Texas ranch. (This past fall, former Mexican president Vincente Fox, a horseman who visited the President at his ranch, called Bush a “windshield cowboy” who actually seems quite afraid of horses.) As Frank points out, the first step in nurturing a cultural class war is “to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society’s ‘elite’ or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world – the power that creates the nation’s real elite, that dominates its real class system . . .”

Which brings us back to Thompson’s syntactically vague yet philosophically pointed slam against New York City and – no matter what you think of him – our former mayor as the personification thereof. All of Giuliani’s sharp, weird edges, so often attached to his New Yorker DNA – the temper tantrums, the bullying, the flagrant adultery, the divorces, the cross-dressing, the outburst in which he told a ferret owner “this excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness” – have done nothing to alienate the conservative voter. (Again, if you look at the numbers: Why would it? For example: In 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reported a divorce rate of 3.6 per 1,000 population, with a 2006 survey by DivorceMagazine.com citing infidelity as the No. 1 cause.) If anything, it’s when Giuliani backs off from his “f – – – off” demeanor – rooting for the Red Sox after they crushed his beloved New York Yankees in the 2007 playoffs, pandering to the NRA – that his essential credibility, as a candidate, and a New Yorker, is questioned.

As for Thompson’s folksy, fuzzy idea that “the rest of the country” – whoever you all are – finds New Yorkers so foreign as to be tolerated, not elected: For the first time since 1944, two New Yorkers (most natives would agree that Hillary Clinton‘s status is nominal, but still) may run against each other for President, picked by the small-town Americans Thompson back-handedly insults. And a third – a 5-foot-7 Jew with astoundingly high approval ratings – is a potential Independent candidate. Not emblematic of the rest of the country? To quote Giuliani when pestered by his ferret-loving constituent: “There is something deranged about you . . . you need help.”