(Via Flickr.)

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and apparently love is in the air in our nation’s capital.  Unfortunately, though, any smell you might notice isn’t the odor of fresh flowers wafting over the recently fallen snow — instead, it’s the hideous congealing of conventional wisdom among Beltway pundits.

Yes, friends, though you might have prayed David Broder was alone in confessing his May-December infatuation with Sarah Palin’s “pitch-perfect populism,” Politico this morning broke the bad news, admitting on behalf of all “mainstream political reporters” that — and I quote — “We love Palin.”

Sure, Politico’s Pool Boy Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Martin play a little coy, claiming Palin’s lure is that “she knows how to exploit our weakness to guarantee herself exposure far out of proportion to her actual influence in Republican politics,” that’s merely squirming after falling into the trap.  (Note: I tried to get a reading on my irony meter for Politico calling someone overhyped, but the needle hasn’t stopped spinning yet.)

Backing up Politico’s assertion are new columns by Marc Ambinder for CBS News and Joe Klein for Time making roughly the same argument — that although the writer sees through Palin’s calculated public persona, she’s got an uncanny sense of the pulse of mainstream (if conservative) Americans.

Curiously, this sort of respect rarely seems to be communicated on behalf of political figures who strike a chord with progressives — who instead are treated with derision as the Beltway pontificators strive to expose them as phonies (cf. Howard Dean).  But then again, maybe both phenomena are simply evidence of the same point:  Be very afraid when veterans of the Village punditocracy try to express their solidarity with “real Americans.”

Call it the Applebee’s salad bar fallacy.