Latte Liberals v Dunkin Donut Democrats

I suppose this should be no surprise. While the Republican Party is deeply split over ideological issues, the Democratic candidates have no significant ideological differences and instead are splitting the vote based on the left's holy trinity of race, class, and gender.

That's what the data from Super Tuesday's election results seems to show. White women are voting for Hillary Clinton to support a woman. Blacks vote for Barack Obama to support a black man. And the vote is also split on the closest thing America has to a genuine class division: educated voters to Obama, the uneducated to Clinton.

The education difference is explained well by British columnist Gerard Baker below. As for the racial divide, it even extends to Latino and Asian voters. This last group is analyzed in The New Republic. Partly, the Asian tilt toward Clinton is explained by an ideological factor: Asian immigrants tend to be more conservative and buy into Bill Clinton's old fraud of being a moderate "New Democrat."

But the article also mentions this factor: "California has a long history of battles over affirmative action, and as Henry Brady, a political scientist at UC Berkeley explained to me, 'A lot of those fights pitted African Americans against Asians.'" In other words, if California's top schools were required to accept more under-performing black students, they had to accept fewer high-performing Asian students.

The author concludes that "Obama's message of a 'post-racial' politics is having trouble reaching beyond white and black audiences." But when has the left every really stood for "post-racial politics"? It is the left that constantly invokes race as a political issue, by promising to divide the spoils of government largesse among various racial and economic pressure groups. But as with Asians versus blacks in college admissions, this pressure-group warfare is a prescription for racial conflict, as each group jostles against the others for a bigger share of government benefits.

In theory and in practice, the left has spent the past few decades insisting that "race, class, and gender" are the fundamental determinants of life and that these divisions are the basic fabric of society. So it's no surprise when competing Democratic candidates end up dividing the vote along precisely these lines.

"Latte Liberals v Dunkin Donut Democrats," Gerard Baker, London Times, February 8

I'm not sure when the term latte liberal replaced the old champagne socialist as the favoured term of derision for the well-heeled leftie but it looks an increasingly useful metaphor for understanding how the deadlock in the Democratic presidential primary election might be broken….
The reason the race is so close has nothing to do with policy differences. I'd wager that not one voter in a hundred could name with any confidence a single difference between the two candidates' stances on the war in Iraq, healthcare, taxes, public spending, abortion or anything else. That's because there isn't one.

The fault lines in the contest instead fall largely along differences in identity—ethnic and gender—and values…. Mrs. Clinton wins heavily among white women, older voters and Latinos. Where they voted in large numbers on Tuesday, she won by large margins. Mr. Obama won states where his following of younger voters, African-Americans and white men predominated….

Mr. Obama wins disproportionately among people who may be considered the winners in the global economy: the well educated, the mobile and the financially secure. Mrs. Clinton's voters are the strugglers, the class that feels itself left behind by an increasingly unfair global economic system.

Consider the exit poll from California, the largest state to vote on Super Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton's largest single demographic voting bloc was those who did not complete a high school education, where she won 82 per cent, against just 15 per cent for Mr. Obama. The more educated you became—from high school drop-out, through high school graduate then some college, college graduate and finally postgraduate—the more likely you were to vote for Mr. Obama. The only category he won, in fact, was the propeller heads with postgraduate degrees….

Mrs. Clinton is the candidate of what might be called Dunkin' Donut Democrats. They do not have money to waste on multiple-hyphenated coffee drinks—double-top, no-foam, non-fat lattes and the like. Not for them the bran muffins or the biscotti. They are the 75-cent coffee and doughnut crowd. For them caffeine choice doesn't correlate with their values but simply represents a means of keeping them going through their challenging day

By esanch36 on Feb 14, 2008, 06:40 in Off Topic.

scotty says on Feb 14, 2008, 13:07:

wasnt this already posted once???

Get Rhythm, when you got the blues. Johnny Cash