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BYCU (Kinda)

Based on her credentials, I think it's safe to say Tina Brown leans pretty heavily to the left. Because she leans left, it seems safe to say that her publication, The Daily Beast, leans left, especially since it merged with the far left Newsweek.

So who cares? I don't, except when a TDE reader sent me this interesting piece about the new liberals that comprise Obama's core. The gist of it: The new Democrats are a bunch of thrill-seeking, shallow individuals that are more concerned about the weekend's party agenda than about anything (or anybody) else. What I find interesting is the leftist magazine's frank portrayal, almost as if there's nothing wrong with it.

When I first read the piece, I didn't appreciate the source and figured I was reading something from National Review or Fox News. But no. It's just journalism about the left from the left.

Excerpts:

Obama owes his success to new groups that have taken center stage in the increasingly liberal post-Clinton Democratic party: the urban “creative class” made up mostly of highly-educated professionals, academics, gays, single people, and childless couples. It's a group Clark once called “the slimmer family.” Such people were barely acknowledged and even mistreated by the old machine; now they are primary players in the “the post-materialistic” party. The only holdovers from the old coalition are ethnic minorities and government workers. . . .
The Chicago that spawned Obama has very different priorities. Clark gives perhaps the best definition–“the city as entertainment machine,” where citizens are preoccupied with quality-of-life issues, “treating their own urban location as if tourists, emphasizing aesthetic concerns.”
This new city, built around the needs of largely childless and often single professionals, focuses primarily on recreation, arts, culture, and restaurants; the resources valued by the newly liberated urban individual. The economy of such places focuses primarily on those jobs done by these professionals, either in the over-hyped social-media sector, traditional entertainment, or as service providers– waiters, toenail painters, dog-walkers–that cater to the gentry of the urban core.
In this urban schema, family, long the basic unit of society, becomes peripheral. The new urban political base–not only in the Windy City but in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and other parts of the core Obama archipelago–is primarily childless, notes demographer Ali Modarres.

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