Back in January of 2010, I drove my old Honda from D.C. up to Massachusetts to help out the Scott Brown campaign in the final days of the push to get him elected to the U.S. Senate. It was a very stimulating experience, because the entire country was caught up in the special-election drama of a charismatic Republican’s bid to win what had for decades been Democrat Ted Kennedy’s senate seat, and of course because Brown did end up winning.

It was exhilarating, to join in and be part of what seemed to be such an historic accomplishment in American politics.

Something very unsettling happened on that trip, however, which illustrates and exemplifies the ongoing rift within the GOP–the sort of civil-war split between the grassroots, Tea Party rank-and-file in the “flyover” states(whose voting-turnout loyalty to the GOP can be somewhat fickle depending on the conservative bona-fides of a candidate) and the elitist, establishment, cocktail-party/consultant types, who frequently call most of the shots and dole out the mother’s milk of politics, the money, sometimes to whom they often incorrectly deem more electable “moderate” nominees(also known as “squishes” to those on the hard right).

When I arrived at Brown campaign headquarters, I was given a hotel room (lodging paid for by the campaign) with another arriving male campaign volunteer as a roommate. Like me, he had just traveled(in his case, flown) all the way from Washington, D.C., to lend a hand for the final get-out-the-vote effort in the last 72 hours of the campaign.

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There was some kind of instant tension between the guy and me. He was a lot younger than I, incidentally, by about 20 years. I was eager to make friends among the crew of campaign staff and numerous volunteers who had come in from all over, but to me he seemed a bit irritated that he had to hob-nob with what I think he saw as the riff-raff, the hoi polloi of GOP activists. I soon found out why.

It turned out that this guy(whose name I remember, but will not mention), despite working on the Brown campaign as a volunteer, was actually a paid, professional political consultant on Capitol Hill. He was there mainly to network, and to enhance his resume, I could tell.

Whereas I had taken unpaid leave from my full-time ordinary job to make the trip, he did this kind of thing for a living–most of time that he wasn’t manning the phone banks alongside myself and others for the Brown campaign, he was in a frothing frenzy on his cell phone to his D.C. colleagues, loudly arguing and screaming about the political advertising campaign they were trying to create and coordinate for whoever, wherever.