Expressing some puzzlement over the decision to put Julian Castro in the cabinet, Brian Beutler refers to him as "mayor of a medium-large city."
It's worth noting that this is an area where the disjunct in America between the size of cities in the sense of political municipalities governed by a mayor and cities in the sense of metropolitan areas where people live and work is important. The San Antonio Metropolitan Area has about 2.3 million residents, making it 25th largest in the country and comparable to Portland or Orlando.
But the City of San Antonio — the place that Castro is the major of — is actually a really big city. With 1.4 million residents it's bigger than San Diego or Dallas or San Francisco or Boston or DC or lots of other cities that we think of as bigger cities than San Antonio. But there are ten states with fewer residents than the City of San Antonio. It's big.
