Hey, Sarah Palin, there are real American heroes, even here in New York City

This is what Sarah Palin said not long ago at a fund-raiser in North Carolina, as she once again decided she was ready to speak for America: "We believe the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very pro-America areas of this great country ... those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom."

Palin would later try to qualify these comments, perhaps because one of her handlers pointed out that she sounded like she came from Wingnut, Alaska, not Wasilla. But you know she meant what she said, far from the big cities about which she and John McCain keep sneering.

Only here was one more wonderful pocket of America yesterday that Gov. Palin knows absolutely nothing about, in one of those big cities, the City of New York.

Here was the building on Simpson St. in the Bronx, where Deon Taylor, a hero of New York and his country, lived before he died last Wednesday in Afghanistan.

If you read this newspaper last week, you know more about Taylor in death than you did in life. He was an NYPD narcotics officer in Brooklyn,a member of the New York National Guard, and was on his second tour in Afghanistan. You hope that he was real enough and pro-America enough for Palin.

This is not just the end of one of the dumbest, meanest Republican campaigns in history. It is also the most divisive. It is no longer liberals vs. conservatives, one ideology against another, one party against the other.

It is Us vs. Them.

If you listen closely to this coded talk about small-town America and small-town values, you wonder how someone like Taylor - if he had been following this campaign instead of fighting for his country - wouldn't have started to get the idea that he was somehow one of Them.

Outside his building yesterday were two handmade signs produced by the children of the St. Angela Merici School. "You are our hero," one said, over a picture of Taylor.

The sign next to it had an American flag drawn on it, and the message: "We will pray for his son." There was a wreath hanging in front of a second-floor balcony and above that, another American flag.

This was the best of America, on Simpson St. in the Bronx.

"He fought for our city as a policeman and then went off to fight for our country," neighbor Tony Aybar was saying. "I don't know if people always think of somebody like Deon as a great American. But he was

There was a son from a previous relationship and a fiancée, Caitlin, waiting for him. He won't see his son or fiancée again, or the new Yankee stadium, or the way the

city looks from the air when you are finally coming home from across the world. Taylor was 30. You wondered if he ever thought of himself as some kind of elitist because he came from here.

In North Carolina, Palin said, "This is where we find the goodness and the courage of everyday

Americans." But you really find it everywhere, not just with the yahoos who cheer her at rallies and jeer at the mention of Obama's name.

Yesterday, you found the goodness and courage of everyday Americans near the place where Simpson St. ends in a culde-sac a few yards from Taylor's building, this quiet street, with some green grass and trees, where Taylor was becoming a part of the quiet royalty of his city.

"At least people know about him now," Aybar said.

It did not take long for this campaign, with a whiff of power and celebrity, to bring out the worst in the Alaska governor. She got picked out of the chorus and now has decided that if she keeps playing to these "pockets" of America, she can actually be President someday. But it has also brought out the worst in Mc-Cain, too, who began selling his soul by selecting her as his running mate. Palin clearly doesn't know any better. Mc-Cain does, or at least used to before he lost his way.

The way they've dumbed down this campaign, you wonder if either one of them really knows what the "real" America is anymore. Or if they could find it with a road map, of Simpson St. or anyplace else?