9000 isn't that small a town.

A town that size has got stoplights and everything! I'm pretty sure my hometown included pets and visiting relatives to hit 1000 during the 1990 census...

The U.S. Census Bureau will let anyone download their datasets. There is some cool stuff here. Did you know they keep track of the population of every city and town?

I did a little crunching in Excel. 16385 of 19494, or 84.0%, of the areas they track had less than 9000 residents in 2007 (in Wisconsin, 504 of 592, or 85.1%).

Granted, the population totals break down 26554516 to 161695447 (the 300M figure must include a lot of fudge factors for underreporting illegal aliens and others who don't fill out their form...), or 16.4% of the population lives in towns under 9000. But a whole lot of city folk came from somewhere small, or their parents did, and they're not all self-loathing hipsters ashamed of their backgrounds...

I can't believe no one on O's staff knows these things, and/or cares enough to tell him to shut up about the small towns already (yeah...now it's personal).