Rising New Money Class Powers Obama

Barack Obama likes to tout his small-donor network, as though a wave of inspired regular folk came out of the woodwork just for him. In reality, Obama is mining a money class that Democrats have been cultivating for years, writes David Brooks in the New York Times—"the rising class of information age analysts."

These are people who were generally raised liberal, educated at left-leaning universities, and eventually rewarded for their expertise. Now, they donate to Democrats, even as Obama waxes populist on issues that would financially hurt them. Drawn from sectors such as law, tech, communication, and finance, it’s a backbone more likely to grow than Republicans' old coalition of agribusiness, oil, and transportation. (More Obama 2008 stories.)