If you've wondered what it means to be spiritually "inside the Beltway," whether for political whores or media ones, Digby is here to tell you

Talk about unintended consequences. The ranks of the D.C. media whores closed this week in defense of the dean of the D.C. media whores. One result was to inspire Digby (who's represented on her website by this image of Network's Howard "I'm Mad As Hell, and I'm Not Going to Take It Anymore" Beal), one of the day's most thoughtful and eloquent writers, and about as far as you can get from being a D.C. media whore, to one of his most thoughtful and eloquent outings, "Who Do They Think They Are?"

In case anyone wonders what we mean here at DWT when Howie and I shake our fists at the "inside the Beltway" mentality, Digby is here to tell you, with a generous assist from Salon's Glenn Greenwald.

It was all prompted by an incident. The first tip I saw came from (natch!) David Sirota, calling attention to a mind-boggling non-meeting of the minds reported in a Radar Online profile of maverick Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel by Jebediah Reed. Greenwald gets us caught up on the background in his Salon piece, "All you need to know about the Beltway journalist mind" (with, at last count, two "updates").

Briefly, the story is this: Gravel, currently basking in attention from his mold-breaking performance in the first Democratic presidential debate, is being squired about by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. Heading for a Morningside Heights Cuban restaurant, they run into one of the great gray eminences of Beltway journalism, now-retired-from-the-Washington Post political writer Thomas Edsall [right]. Alter introduces Gravel to Edsall, with due reverence. Whereupon, Reed recounts:

Gravel smiles broadly and says, "Hey, can you straighten out David Broder?" Broder, an influential columnist at the Post and the unofficial godfather of the D.C. press corps, has been a target of much criticism from liberal blogs for seeming to provide political cover for Bush on Iraq, even with a majority of Americans now opposing the war. "He doesn't believe in the power of the people!" Gravel says.

Edsall blinks and looks perplexed. "David Broder is the voice of the people," he replies matter-of-factly. Gravel starts to smile, assuming Edsall is making an absurdist joke. But Edsall is not joking. The two men look at each other in awkward silence over a great gulf of unshared beliefs, then Gravel chuckles and walks ahead into the restaurant.

Now Greenwald picks up the story:

I would be willing to wager that the vast majority of Beltway journalists agree with Edsall that Broder [left] is a real, true, salt-of-the-earth representative "of the people." That's more or less what [Time columnist] Joe Klein said recently in praise of Broder:

No, what I most like about Broder as a reporter is that he has taken pains over the years to talk at length with the sort of people who don't go to protests, and even to folks who don't go to political meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire. He'll actually go door to door, or convene a group of neighbors, to find out what's important to them.

See, Broder knows how the "ordinary people" think because he leaves the Beltway and goes and studies them real up close like farm animals and then comes back to Washington and publishes his findings about the behavioral patterns of this odd species known as "the people."

Beltway journalists want to believe that Broder is "the voice of the people" because that means that they are, too. After all, he is their Dean, their representative, and by convincing themselves that he has legitimacy with "the people," that he speaks for the "real, ordinary Americans," it means that they do, too.

Now Greenwald is set to move into high gear:

The idea that David Broder is the "voice of the people" is particularly ludicrous given that the crux of David Broder's worldview--to the extent that he has such a thing--is that whatever else happens in Washington, the top priority is that our elegant and elevated power centers be shielded from the wild passions and uncontrolled fervor of the lowly, rambunctious, impetuous masses. Broder is the "voice of the people" in the most condescending manner possible--he loves them like his misguided and ignorant children, innocents and vulnerables who need to be protected by the sober and wise adults who know best.

The disconnect between, on the one hand, what Beltway media stars think about and care about, and the lives of most Americans on the other, is so vast that it is difficult to describe. One could argue that the complete disconnect between our Beltway power centers and the lives of most Americans is the single greatest deficiency in our political culture. Yet the preening, insulated pundits of the royal court think the opposite.

This is where Digby picks up the story, noting that Greenwald's piece drew from a wounded Joe Klein the astonishing assumption that he was saying that "people like Broder and Ron Brownstein and me shouldn't talk to people outside the Beltway."

That isn't the problem at all, of course, as Greenwald subsequently points out. Although he's too kind to say so, the problem is that it's pointless for someone like Klein to pretend to hear the voice of the people when his reading skills are so obviously defective. His utter inability to read what Greenwald wrote should by itself disqualify him from the discussion, if not from journalistic employment.

I love Greenwald's image of poseurs like Broder going out in search of "Real Americans" as "zoologists" going out in the field to observe the animals. Digby has thought about this process too, and suggests that anthropologists of the Broder sort venture into "real" America

with a sort of pre-conceived notion of what defines "the people" that appears to have been formed by TV sit-coms in 1955. They seem to see extraordinary value in sitting in some diner with middle aged and older white men (sometimes a few women are included) to "ask them what they think." And invariably these middle-aged white men say the country is going to hell in a handbasket and they want the government to do more and they hate paying taxes. There may be a little frisson of disagreement among these otherwise similar people on certain issues of the day because of their affiliation with a union or because of the war or certain social issues, but for the most part they all sit together and politely talk politics with this anthropologist/reporter, usually agreeing that this president or another one is a bum or a hero. The reporter takes careful notes of everything these "real Americans" have to say and take them back to DC and report them as the opinions of "the people."

And Digby has a theory as to how, when, and where the "fetishization" of the "mythical 'Real American'" began, with Broder's predecessor as "dean" of the Washington press corps, Joseph Kraft, observing the street violence between protesters and the first Mayor Richard Daly's forces of "order" at the 1968 Democratic presidential convention in Chicago.

Unfortunately for us all, this got Kraft to thinking, and there are people who just aren't trained to do it, and shouldn't attempt it. Even if they survive some of the early steps, the chances of their coming out the other end with any useful conclusions are remote.

Kraft, says Digby--

defined "Middle America" as a blue collar or rural white male, "traditional in his values and defensive against innovation." Ever since then, the denizens of the beltway have deluded themselves into thinking they speak for that "silent majority." (And what a serendipitous coincidence it was that this happened at the moment of a right wing political ascension that also made a fetish out of the same blue collar white male.) The converse of this, of course, is that they also assume that the "fringe" liberals from the coasts are way out of the mainstream.

Here Digby enters into evidence the famous 1998 manifesto hurled by the doyenne of Beltway insiders, Sally Quinn, in revulsion against that boorish hillbilly and his wicked ways. She stuck up for "the so-called Beltway Insiders--the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it," and then she wrote two one-sentence paragraphs:

They call the capital city their "town."

And their town has been turned upside down.

Digby grasps the magnitude of the horror:

Here you had the most powerful people in the world identifying themselves with Bedford Falls from "It's A Wonderful Life" when the court of Versailles or Augustan Rome would be far more more apt. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Thirty years after Kraft's epiphany, this decadent world capital that had recently seen the likes of Richard Nixon's crimes and John F. Kennedy's philandering (and corruption of all types, both moral and legal at the highest levels for years), were now telling the nation that they themselves were small town burghers and factory workers upholding traditional American values.

Among the outraged burghers Quinn quoted was--and tell me you didn't see this coming--none other than the D.C. press dean himself, David S. Broder:

"He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place."

Let's all pause a moment in remembrance of the place that hillbilly Bill Clinton trashed. Okay, that's long enough. Fortunately, better days lie ahead for Sally's village.

"What an achievement!" Digby exclaims of Sally and her fellow villagers. "The very rich and powerful (but we won't talk about that) 'bourgeoisie' now had to save degenerate 'Middle America' from itself."

When the equally phony George W. Bush came to town it was love at first sight, and why wouldn't it be? Here you had a man whom these people could truly admire---a rich man of the bluest blood, born into one of the most powerful families in America who nonetheless pretended to be some hick from Midland Texas. He took great pride in his phoniness, just as they did, and they all danced this absurd kabuki in perfect step for years each pretending to the other that they were all "just regular guys."

You can see then why some of us have concluded that the Dean and his cadre of establishment courtiers don't actually care much about what "the people" think about anything. And it should also be obvious why we are so skeptical of their reporting skills when they venture out on their anthropological expeditions to find only examples of Americans who strangely hew to their own Hollywood casting of themselves--an America of Sally Quinns warmly played by plucky Donna Reed and David Broder himself, brought to life by loveable Wilfred Brimleys. ("They came in and they trashed the place. And it's not their place." Can't you just hear it?)

To encourage you to look at the Digby piece for yourself, I'm not going to quote the final paragraph, which is one fine, slambang piece of writing. But you've got the gist. By now you can probably guess what he thinks of people like D.C. media types venturing out to the heartland to meet "Real Americans" and then rushing back to make the white-tie dinner for the Queen of England.

The key thing to remember, though, is that there really is a tight little community huddled there inside the Beltway, and it's a community of political whores and media whores and hanger-on whores. They venture out of their little community only to hear voices already playing inside their heads. On the basis of those voices, they're going to save America--from Americans.

And if they should happen to get rich in the process, well, that would be the Lord's work, wouldn't it?


UPDATE: DIGBY! DIGBY! DIGBY!

The Blue America community gets richer this week as Digby joins Crooks & Liars, Firedoglake, and DownWithTyranny in the raising of consciousness and resources for grassroots and progressives seeking elected office.