"Such coalition building made Obama the first urban president in more than a century," David Gergen, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, writes in a Times review of David Axelrod's book Believer: My Forty Years In Politics.
I can't figure out what Professor Gergen means. John Kennedy, for whom the school at which Mr. Gergen teaches is named, voted from a Boston apartment address and lived in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood. George H.W. Bush's residence was within the city of Houston, Texas, and when he was Reagan's vice president he lived in Washington, D.C. Do Boston, Houston, and Washington not count as "urban' in Professor Gergen's definition? If so, it sure is an idiosyncratic definition.