Dem Leadership is Badly Out of Touch With Real America

As Jim Geraghty points out, the members of the Dem House leadership come from districts where they probably never even get to meet a Republican, let alone worry about Republican votes:

...I think that a lot of the problems facing the Democrats in 2010 were baked in the cake: sluggish economic growth at best, letdown after a campaign that treated Obama as a messiah, a reflexive overselling of policy initiatives that never live up to the hype. But those problems are exacerbated by the fact that most of their prominent leaders in Congress come from districts where the incumbents could say nothing but "I am the walrus, coo coo kachu" in every speech for the next six months and still win with about 65 percent of the vote: Pelosi in San Francisco, Barney Frank in Massachusetts, Henry Waxman in Hollywood, Charlie Rangel in Harlem, Jim Clyburn from the heavily African-American corners of South Carolina. The guy whose job it is to monitor the party's health for upcoming elections, DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen, comes from a D+21 district in the Maryland suburbs. These guys have no idea what voters think outside of their deep-blue enclaves, and don't realize that in most places where there is still a functioning two-party system, calling voters who are upset with your performance irrational is political suicide.

These people are hopelessly out of touch with real America. They slam critics as "irrational" because everyone they know in their home districts agrees with them. That's not a recipe for sound governance.