But you've put you're finger on a huge part of the problem: the more time you spend in academia (either as a student or as a professor), the more liberal you become. Also--and this has come as a shock to white folks--racial identity is an amazingly powerful force in voting decisions. It's more powerful than values with most minorities. Asians see themselves as "outsiders," and Obama as one who can sympathize with them. Those judgments may be absolutely irrational, but they hold sway with a lot of voters, even those in the "cognitive elite." Racial ID and liberal indoctrination are important reasons Asians voted for Zero.
Another point.....in the universities, the Asians are NOT wasting their time on BS pseudointellectual pursuits such as Feminazi Studies, Marxism 101, Chicano Studies, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender History and the usual crap.....No... in the universities they are studying useful things like medicine, business, economics, physics, mathematics, science, biology, and engineering-—so therefore I would think they would not be so vulnerable to the usual radical left indoctrination from left-wing professors.
One of the commenters to the article, Noah Smith, agrees with you. Here is his diagnosis:
If they're not "takers", why did Asian-Americans break so strongly for Obama? The answer is pretty clear: Conservative ethnic identity politics. The American conservative movement has made it abundantly clear that it sees America as a "white people country", and views Asians - like blacks and Hispanics - as guests (at best) or interlopers (at worst). The blood-and-soil white ethnocentrism of the conservative movement makes Asians feel like permanent foreigners in their own country, and they don't like feeling like that. Who would?I'm pretty sure this is the right answer. Why? Because I myself am a member of a group that is demographically and electorally similar to Asian-Americans - namely, Jewish-Americans. Jews are America's second-richest religious group (behind Hindus), and yet Jewish voters broke almost 3-to-1 for Obama this year, and more than 3-to-1 in 2008. Why do Jews vote Democratic? Simple: for all their talk of "Judeo-Christian values" and support for Israel (as if anyone cares about that!), the Republicans make it clear that they think the ethnic core of America is not just white, but Christian as well. Jews don't want to have their schools lead them in prayers to Jesus. We don't like it when Bill O'Reilly demands that stores put only "Merry Christmas" on their holiday banners, and not "Happy Channukah".
We Jews are not stupid; we know that the grassroots of the conservative movement, at least in its present incarnation, will never accept us as true "sons of the soil". The liberal movement will. It's as simple as that. And I'm pretty sure Asian-Americans are thinking along similar lines.
How do we counteract that perception?
You and Lady Thatcher:
...The government aims to supervise these different groups and keep the peace by redistributing income from one to another.
Thus the utopia of multiculturalism involves a bureaucratic
class presiding over a nation divided into a variety of ethnic nationalities. That, of course, looks awfully like the old Soviet Union. Such a system cannot work, and its failure is likely to inflict great damage on the people, their traditions, and their liberties.
— Lady Margaret Thatcher