24-Hour Party People - My favorite "conservative" commentator is David Brooks of the NYTimes. In last weekend's column, David divided America's information-age elite into spreadsheet people and paragraph people. Deriving his data from campaign donations classified by occupation, he declares

Spreadsheet people work with numbers, wear loafers and support Republicans. Paragraph people work with prose, don't shine their shoes as often as they should and back Democrats.

The former include CEOs and accountants, while the latter include acadmeics, authors and actors. Why the divide? According to Brooks, it all depends on how you majored in college. Liberal arts graduates "naturally loathe people who majored in econ, business and the other 'hard' fields." He claimes this animosity gets political later in life and "explains just about everything you need to know about political conflict today."

Brooks says accountants -- "whose relationship with numbers verges on the erotic" are heavily Republican, but lawyers -- "people who didn't realize that they wanted to be novelists until their student loan burdens were already too heavy" -- are nearly 3-to-1 Democratic. Just one question remains, Ben. Is your hubby one of those "liberal accountants ... so filled with self-loathing that they ally politically with social and cultural rivals"?