Toying With People

Someone I know well, who has years of experience in Washington journalism circles, likes to say that the folks covering all this stuff are basically a bunch of high school kids, full of cliques, in-groups, who think that everything going on is about them. It's hard to come up with a better example of this mentality than the following post from Noam Scheiber, cleverly titled "What the Hell Is Taking So Long?":

I have no idea, but I'd guess it points to a bigger name rather than a smaller one. (I think Jonathan Cohn made a version of this point earlier in the week, though I can't remember if he did it online or during one of our many rounds of internal speculation.)

You can let the suspense build and build if you've got a Hillary or a Gore socked away somewhere. Possibly a Biden or a Webb (or some unorthodox pick like a general or a Republican). But you'd better not come with Jack Reed or Evan Bayh after toying with people for over a week. [Emphasis added.]

Toying with people. Sheesh. Maybe Scheiber, who in fairness has done plenty of grown-up writing, would benefit from spending less time at the Chi-Cha (or wherever everyone goes these days) and reading what the late Paul Wellstone once said:

In the last analysis, politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.