Clueless

Stu Rothenberg has joined David Broder in castigating the dirty f#@king hippies left wing grassroots. Didn't you know we're all just a small rabel of noisemakers?

Here's what Stu, usually a pretty good watcher of politics and pollster no less, had to say:

Congressional Democrats apparently were surprised by the base’s reaction to the bill’s passage. They shouldn’t have been. Have they been living under a rock?

We’ve seen grass-roots Democratic anger for the past few years directed at the White House, and the animosity and invective aimed at Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) during his bid for renomination and re-election should have warned House and Senate Democrats that even they are not immune to attacks from left-of-center bloggers who see any cooperation with the White House on Iraq as perfidy.

Increasingly, the Democratic left is acting much the way the Republican right has acted for decades, measuring Capitol Hill behavior against a standard of ideological purity that treats pragmatists as traitors and those who compromise as worse than the enemy.

These voices have always been around, mind you. It is just that they now have a megaphone with the Internet, much as angry conservatives did when talk radio burst on the scene more than a decade ago….

Maybe Democratic leaders could have done a better job preparing angry party activists for the passage of the spending bill, possibly sparing Hill Democrats the nasty e-mails and angry comments on liberal blogs, but I doubt it. Democrats have spent so many months cranking up the volume on Iraq — making it a major issue in the 2006 elections and since then increasing their attacks on the president and his policies — that it would have been very difficult to persuade grass-roots anti-war activists to accept a deal with the White House that funded the war for even another week.

I'm becoming pretty accustomed to those who consider themselves the wise men, the moderates, of Washington punditry to castigate the netroots. What I continue to find astounding is how their personal bias and perception shapes a view that is so completely out of touch with reality and not supported by the data. Particularly when done by a pollster.

The Iraq war is one example, but Joe Lieberman is another. Lieberman only won his seat based on catering to Republicans. Those who are Democrats .... of all stripes .... repudiated Joe and his policies in the Connecticut primary. But to Rothenberg and those of his ilk, it was the radical wild-eyed left that has been a thorn in Boltin' Joe's side.

I just wish these folks would read a poll once in awhile. There was a time, a dark time, when many of the views I held were a minority view. And I lamented that point at the time. That time has now passed .... at least according to the polls.