I suppose I'm having a lot of flashbacks to the Obama administration. The early days of that was my "peak going to DC" time, an era where I did meet with members and staffers, etc. There's a kind of righteous certainty among people who succeeded because they knew who to check all the right boxes when they were 15, a belief that if they (and you) do check all the the right boxes than everything will go as planned. High fives! (Snuffy Walden score!)
Not a lot of self-doubt, not a lot of self-recrimination.
Among other things, it's a worldview which is very unsympathetic to the failure of others, failures that could not have resulted from anything other than a failure to check the boxes.
