An NYT piece on entertainment liberals on the coasts and how the people in the "flyover states" voted.

isappointment was thick and palpable, an ill-tempered fog at the United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills where - who could concentrate? - the business of Hollywood was interrupted by constant discussions of What Went Wrong.

The assistant to Jim Berkus, the agency's chairman, fielded an e-mail message from a colleague who apologized for voting for President Bush, while an administrator, preparing a podium for a company event, grumbled quietly about wedge issues.

"They demonized Hollywood," said the administrator, Michael Conway, referring to the Bush campaign. "We make the one product everyone wants, we make the best American-made product there is. What's going to happen, some kind of blacklist?"

In the best of times Hollywood and New York, liberal strongholds and the main engines of the country's entertainment and arts, are not closely connected to what people on the coasts call "the flyover states," that vast center of the country that voted its majority for Mr. Bush.

But in the wake of the election result, many producers, actors, writers and others in the culture business had to ask: are we seriously out of touch? What does the election result, felt so bitterly in Hollywood and New York, say about the divide between those who create popular culture and many of those who consume it?