What is to be done about the Beltway Pundit class?

Here is a passionate review of the performance of this group leading up to the election – using Russ Feingold’s censure resolution against warrantless eavesdropping as the touchstone. The conventional D.C. wisdom was that he was simply paving the way with the liberal Democratic base for his 2008 Presidential run, and, of course, that he was handing the Republicans an automatic 2006 victory by painting the Democrats as soft on security. But then, whoops, the Democrats won, and Feingold just announced he will not be a candidate in 2008:

The Beltway pundit class and the premises which generate conventional Washington wisdom are corrupt to their core and always wrong. And this Feingold announcement illustrates a major reason why that it so. They operate from a set of completely unexamined, empty premises that reflect their own character and belief system, but nobody else's. They have no core convictions and no passion and think that those attributes are the marks of sober, responsible people. And they project those character flaws onto everyone else and assume that nobody other than unserious lunatics are motivated by real belief.

All of that combines to produce a worldview that is as inaccurate as it is bereft of integrity and principle. The excitement over new politicians like Jim Webb and Jon Tester -- and the passion inspired by Russ Feingold and even Howard Dean -- has nothing to do with long-standing and increasingly obsolete liberal/conservative stereotypes (the only prism through which the media can analyze the election results, which is why they are so confused). Instead, the excitement is due to a widespread hunger for people who are outside of and immune to the entire, soul-less Beltway machinery -- a system which, in every aspect, is broken and empty at its core.

This, of course, is nothing new from the liberal "netroots." The DC pundits are not going away, however, so we need strategies for turning them around, too.