The Smackdown Of The Creative Class: The Ideas of Gentry Liberals Lose Big

Joel Kotkin has one of the best postmortems from last night's stunning Democrat party defeat:

The creative class also has benefited from the lavish expenditures of public funds to major universities for research. This has lifted the prospects of the professoriate at the elite colleges from which Obama takes much of his advice. Finally the administration has rewarded its friends and funders among Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Once self-described paragons of entrepreneurial risk-taking, they increasingly search out government incentives and subsidies to pay for their large bets on renewable energy technology.

In contrast, the traditional middle class has not fared well at all. This group consists of virtually everyone who earns the national household median income of $50,000 or somewhat above. They tend to be white, concentrated outside the coasts (except along the Gulf), suburban and politically independent. In 2008 they divided their votes, allowing Obama, with his huge urban, minority and youth base, to win easily.

Since Obama's inauguration all the economic statistics vital to their lives--job creation, family income, housing prices--have been stagnant or negative. Not surprising then that suburbanites, small businesspeople and middle-income workers walked out on the Democrats last night.

You'll want to read the whole article twice.