But the sense of entitlement and righteousness that seems intrinsic to contemporary liberalism has been endorsed by the press and allows Democrats to play outside the rules.
So when Mr Mitchell arrives this weekend, he will find unionists and republicans capable of sitting down to negotiate away from the spotlight, but bristling with grievance and self-righteousness in public.
Mr Connerly's detractors have accused him of everything from McCarthyism to self-hatred to being a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser, but he seems untainted by the paranoid self-righteousness that is so common on the American right.
In any other business, such a suggestion would ruffle scarcely a hair, but the education business has wrapped itself in such a mantle of righteousness that it and its defenders become livid if anyone suggests it should be subject to even the sketchiest economic rules.