I've spent a lot of time (god my life is horrible give me some money please) thinking about the politics of the DC political press corps. Obviously they aren't all precisely the same, but there is a culture. Roughly they're moderate Republicans in a world that doesn't actually have any moderate Republicans aside from them. They're Nice Polite Republicans.
They like low taxes. They think there are real problems in the world that should be solved, but they think Bill Gates, not the government, should solve them. Charity is noble, welfare is bad. They don't like racism, but racism to them is the uncouth N*clang kind, not the "let's hear what Charles Murray has to say" kind. More troubling than racism is "identity politics" which is the politics of people who don't run the world. Homophobia is bad but, really, people should just keep these things to themselves and gay marriage was crazy radical until it wasn't.
If you squint a bit, the difference between Nice Polite Republicans and Republicans is the Polite part, and manners are mostly a class-based construct to help identify the insiders and the outsiders. In other words, they're just upper middle class white people who probably vote for Democrats much of the time but are desperate to vote for Republicans as soon as they can find one who knows which fork to use with the appetizer and who treats the help nicely, at least in public. Every time Fournier or Friedman or Matthew Dowd or whoever starts on the third party wank this is what they are talking about. They want politicians who pretend to give a shit, who intellectualize their racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and know who the people who really matter are.