I came across the words "latte liberal" while reading an article in The Economist on the US presidential election --which is, by the way, waaaay better than this so-called analysis in Kompas daily.
The Latte Liberals are the term used by Hillary Clinton camp to describe young and educated supporters of Obama. Geographically, they are mostly located in big cities in Northeast and West Coast. Surely it is a variant of the old word of "anti-establishment east upper side Manhattanites", whom Woody Allen's films represent.
And this does not refer to the "neo liberals", to whom some of us love to hate for being responsible for our economic problems. Liberals in the US are the Democrats, who, in economic sphere, most of the time, are for rather high tax and more subsidy and transfer --hence less ardent free market supporter than their fellow Republicans.
Latte liberals are on the rise here. And actually I am curious: to whom our own latte liberals supports for our next President election? Also, if you are the candidate, would you really take them into account as important voters?
But, in the first place, who are actually our latte liberals?
(Okay, I hear you, Co. Latte ain't coffee. Can't agree more. And you Manager, don't say that latte liberals are bunch of snotty people. Likely, they are our cafe's target market)
From the 2004 elections, our 'latte liberals' seem to go for the big guy, Mr SBY....If public social networking sites can be a good measure for an indicator, this guess should have some degree of empirical support : nearing the elections, many of these supposedly latte liberals expressed their support for SBY on their Friendster page(which was THE biggest thing in internet social networking in indonesia at the time)...
ReplyDeleteFacebook can probably tell us what the Economist or the NY Times article that Rizal alluded to....I did a quick group search on both Hilary and Barrack. The first two pages of search for "obama" showed support groups. A 'students group supporting Obama' had more than 71k members.
On the other side, the first two pages of a group search for Hilary Clinton resulted in various hate-groups such as "the day Hilary Clinton becomes president is the day I move to Australia..."
Puspa, frankly, I have no clear idea who our latte liberals are, let alone their political aspiration.
ReplyDeleteIt would be very interesting to see whether allocating significant resources, and political machineries, to tap their votes will pay --given that giving up Jakarta doesn't necessarily mean a lose in national contest.