Also, hey cliffelam, this is an NPR article! How many miles do you have on your volvo? ;P
I lived in Cambridge a couple of years. Folks referred to it as "The People's Republic of Cambridge", which was somewhat fitting. Now I live in Ann Arbor, which isn't much more to the right. Ann Arbor is sometimes called "21 square miles, surrounded by reality." It's easy to have a socially liberal town when a huge college is pumping cash into the place.
Funny political story - Chapel Hill and Carrboro are contiguous small towns clustered around UNC-CH. They both are in Orange County. The cities are wealthy, the county is poor. Got that fixed in your head? At one point Jessie Jackson won Chapel Hill (which was 99% white) and lost Orange County (which was 75% black). Jessie Helms (not the same thing as Jessie Jackson) once said of the North Carolina Zoo - Why build that, put a fence around Chapel Hill and charge admission. And, my final favorite came when Carrboro (which is land locked and gets about 75% of its power from the local Nuke) voted to become a nuclear free zone, specifically excluding all nuclear navy vessels. -XC