Obama has met only with Beltway commentators as president, except maybe for Kathleen Parker

Despite using victories in rural states like Iowa to win the 2008 election, President Obama hasn't met with a single pundit from middle America, libertarian columnist Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune reports. Chapman asked the White House for a list of commentators who met with the president in the last year and was provided a list of 37 names, none of which "hails from outside the Georgetown-Manhattan corridor."

"There are, of course, dozens of columnists and editorial writers from flyover country, but the White House hasn't found one worthy of a meeting with Obama," Chapman writes. "There are also lots of conservatives and libertarians, but they also need not apply." Self-described conservative columnists Kathleen Parker and David Brooks did meet with Obama, but Chapman writes neither "is a favorite of most true-blue right-wingers." Parker, left, is the closest thing to a middle American writer; she's based in both Camden, S.C., and Washington.

"You can't really blame Obama. He has to worry that a bunch of tobacco-chewing rednecks would track manure into the Oval Office or waste his time asking for directions to the Washington Monument," Champan writes. "But once in a while it's good for a president to know what's on the minds of people in the Land Beyond the Potomac." (Read more)