In a thoughtful Washington Post piece printed yesterday, Alex MacGillis both accepts and complicates the characterization of Obama as a potential "urban president," instead describing the Democratic nominee as potentially the nation's first "Metropolitan President." For MacGillis, the semantic distinction is crucial:

His style is as urbane as American politics get -- blazers with no tie, the slow stride across the stage. His political base is even more urban than is typical for a Democrat, while he struggles with rural voters despite playing up his mother's Kansas roots. One of the first interest groups he met with after securing the Democratic nomination in June was an alliance of bicycling advocates. Yet Obama has hardly adopted the sort of agenda we've come to expect from urban candidates -- much to the consternation of some of his supporters. With his organizer background, he could have cast himself as a knight riding to the rescue of cities neglected by Republican administrations. Instead, he has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types -- promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings. Cities, he argues, are now melded to their suburbs, and, taken as a whole, America's metro areas are the "backbone of regional growth," as he put it in a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "Washington remains trapped in an earlier era," he said, "wedded to an outdated 'urban' agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas, an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both."

This messaging tactic is deliberate, both in its politics and policy. On the former, the suburbs have become America's political battleground -- nobody can win the presidency without sizable support from these types of communities. Appealing to the suburban voters is especially important for Democrats because, while economically and socially diverse, it's a demographic that's ripe for growth. And for Obama, a biracial man vying for the nation's highest office, running as a big city Democrat was out of the question from the beginning.

If done right, the policy makes sense too. For one, the problems affecting cities and suburbs are often mutually enforcing. "The old lines are blurring as employment patterns have scattered across regions," writes MacGillis, "poverty is growing faster in many suburbs than it is downtown, and more immigrants are settling in the 'burbs." Framing transit, housing, education, and employment issues in a metropolitan context can help convince wealthier urban and suburban dwellers that "the core affects the vitality of the whole."

Of course, that's easier said than done. As Dana Goldstein notes, racial, economic, and and political tensions are still strong between cities and their surrounding communities: "Because of gas prices, suburbanites do want better transit, for sure. But the issues at play are more complex than that and require changes in the suburban lifestyle; changes that, so far, have been difficult to enforce or even incentivize politically." No issue in Illinois dramatizes that fight more than the decades-long battle over school funding reform.

An Obama administration also runs the risk of focusing too heavily on suburban politics, thereby overlooking some urgent urban problems. That's a problem worth inspecting down the road. For now, all we have is his platform, which suggests the Illinois senator would be a strong advocate for the nation's cities, too. We highlighted some of his proposals here, and MacGillis adds some thoughts of his own:

Obama hasn't entirely abandoned older conceptions of urban uplift. His platform includes Democratic standbys such as restoring funding to the Community Development Block Grant program, which Republicans deride as a money pit; expanding the earned-income tax credit; investing in job training; creating an affordable-housing trust fund; paying for more cops on the street. He talks of creating 20 "promise neighborhoods" modeled on the Harlem Children's Zone, where an intensive application of services -- from prenatal care on up -- aims to lift an entire neighborhood.