Heh indeed.

Former New York Times reporter John Phillips's column on the punditocracy's contempt for evangelicals is sure to set the righty blogosphere atwitter with "I-told-you-so's" and "even NY Times reporter John Phillips said!" But while they march off to the fight the good fight against fact checkers, it's worth a moment to figure out what Phillips is really arguing here.

Kevin, in a post about congressional Republicans' abuses of power, writes:

Unfortunately, this kind of backroom drudgery can't compete with runaway brides. So how do you get the public to pay attention to this kind of stuff? I'm not sure. But "playing by the rules" is a pretty ingrained American habit, and this brand of Republican hardball would be widely unpopular if someone could figure out a way to dramatize it. Who will figure out how to do it?

Maybe this isn't new. Maybe I'm just too young to recognize one of the book's older tricks. But since the election, there seem to be quite a number of Democratic pundits, columnists, and luminaries leveraging home purchases deep in Virginia for populist cred. Could we, you know, stop? Meeting 50 folks in rural Virginia doesn't strike me as quite enough down-home experience to claim credentials as a channeler of America's "jes' folks" contingent. And, more to the point, wouldn't it be great if we didn't buy into this pundit-propagated fiction that some swaths of America are somehow more real than others and experience, even glancing experience, in said territories imbues the cow-milker with special wisdom, insight and understanding?