Stop Playing Nice With Pundits

Beltway Democrats would do well to read this post from Josh Marshall on why Democrats should blow off the D.C. chattering class. Bottom line, they're not our friends. These people would throw a drowning man an anvil. They take stupid people seriously and smart people lightly. They're rich enough that they don't have to care whether government is good or not, so for them it's all a giant cocktail party where caring enough to actually know what you're talking about is so uncool. It's high school with suits. The Republicans blow them off routinely, which actually makes pundits treat them better. (Like many high school kids, they're interested primarily in attracting the approval of people who don't like them.) Democrats should learn to do that. The last Democrat to have a truly cozy relationship with the press was Jack Kennedy. Lyndon, Jimmy, and Bill all took it in the teeth. It surprised Lyndon, who thought he could do as well as Jack did and tried endlessly. (The Kennedy's sabotaged many of those attempts, but Lyndon did a lot of damage himself.) The D.C. crowd blew up Jimmy Carter before he could even get started--who was this upstart from Georgia to tell us how to run things? Bill Clinton treated them all roughly because he knew he had no friends among them, and it was this, as much as anything else, that helped him survive. Now, in the era of Fox News's 24-hour pundit fest, the Democrats need to get used to the idea that, in D.C. anyway, they have no friends. It's time for a bunker mentality guys, because if this isn't war, what is?