What always strikes me about institutional Beltway journalists is their provincialism.  There really is a fairly dogmatic belief that comes through in their writing that Border State Democrats are the epitome of the Democratic Party, that between the Susquehanna and the Rappahannock somehow the full Democratic universe is properly contained and everywhere else is a set of outliers where people are not clued in to political reality as they believe is created by -emanates from- the Beltway.  The blind spots are incredibly apparent in, say, their dreary, persistent, miscoverage and misinterpretation of the Latino-based politics of the Southwest.

Deborah Howell is just fairly typical- she sounds almost exactly like the people I know from upper tier families in northern Virginia or Maryland.  Sure of their place in the local game, sure of what the common view is among their own, assertive of this convention- and then horrified when people tell them that it's not the national reality or even factual, taking it as an attack on their personal credibility and that of their oh-so-elevated social circle.  It's wounded elitism or entitlement.

The simply fact of the matter is that this crowd has internalized the Midwest and Border States as the social norm of the country and Southerners as the institutional rulers.  Lost in this perspective and simplification are the weight and power of the Northeast (whose elites the Beltway crowd hates out of snobbery) and the West Coast.  The building reassertion of the Northeast and West Coast power in Washington in the form of active and energetic Democrats is a challenge to their cozy arrangements and corruption with Republicans.

In short, activist Democrats are endangering the Beltway establishment's comfort and power and status by exposing them and their unregenerate, lazy, selfserving faux elitist ways.  They're obviously resorting to trying to shoot the messengers in order to continue in denial of the message of the next era in politics: serve The People, justify your leisure and status in some fashion.  A political variety of New Economy is starting to engulf Washington's chattering classes, and they hate it.