As a longtime admirer of Joel Kotkin’s iconoclastic thinking on urban issues, I am usually in agreement with his signature issue: the defense of American suburbia against attacks by environmentalists and policymakers who would like to promote a denser, transit-oriented way of life. Kotkin believes there has been no fundamental shift away from suburbs and back into cities, despite myriad media reports citing the trend. At worst, this narrative is driven by an ideological agenda; at best, it reflects a misreading of consumers’ unchanged preferences for single-family housing.

But in his latest article on newgeography.com, Kotkin has gone a step further to declare that the Democratic Party’s electoral defeat in the recent Massachusetts Senate race can be attributed to Obama’s “war against suburbia,” an aggressively pro-urban agenda that has in effect alienated a key bloc of “swing” voters living outside major cities.

The evidence for this so-called “war against suburbia”? A proposal to convert interstate highways to toll roads is one of many smoking guns, since in theory it would disproportionately impact suburbanites who drive more. Yet Kotkin also points out in the same breathe that suburbanites have shorter commutes to work than the average city dweller, due to the increasing dispersion of job centers, so it is unclear why they would be more affected by toll roads than anyone else.

As everyone knows, the real impetus behind toll road and congestion pricing proposals is a bankrupt Highway Trust Fund, not some imaginary war on suburbia. A policy that asks drivers to internalize the costs of road use deserves to be part of the political conversation. Of course, there is a double standard at work in Kotkin’s stance: massive federal subsidies for highway maintenance are somehow not “anti-urban,” whereas investments in mass transit are utterly “anti-suburban.”

Armed with a few original insights and talking points, Kotkin has built an enviable career as a nationally syndicated columnist. In this case, though, his tendency to apply the same insight to every situation results in a bit of an overreach.