Here’s the long edit I promised you. Thanks to PJM producer Andrew Marcus for lending me a snippet of his interview with the chairman to punctuate Ford’s obsequious gladhanding of someone who spent last weekend sneering at the “con job” organization he leads and the “bunch of cranks” who populate it. Pathetically, it’s Ford, not Kos, who first broaches the idea of merging the two factions.

You’ll find a few other bits amid the ass-kissing. The comic highlight comes when David Gregory asks each to list the top three policy items on his agenda. Kos, never a big “ideas” guy, dodges the question with some oatmeal about getting the candidates to open up; Ford rattles off clean energy, income inequality, and health care. Gregory supplies the punchline, resulting in one of the all-time great afterthought reaction shots. After some more ass-kissing there’s an exchange of one-liners — Ford responding to Kos’s point about Clinton never having won 50% of the vote and Kos responding to Ford’s point about not all of last year’s Democratic candidates being able to leverage Bush’s unpopularity.

Finally, I included the strange-new-respect segment where Kos climbs down from his blistering anti-Hillary op-ed of a few months ago to fawn over her incredible incredibleness just to remind people what a cheap date he is, a fact not lost upon the campaigns. Quote:

“They’re so painfully craving any type of mainstream acceptance that they’re prone to the crassest kind of flattery and pandering, which weakens them,” said a senior aide to a Democratic campaign of the bloggers. Recalling a lavish party then-candidate Mark Warner threw at the 2006 YearlyKos convention in Last Vegas, the aide noted: “Mark Warner bought them off with a fountain and some chocolate strawberries.”

You may not get his endorsement, but show up to his party and pat him on the head and you’re guaranteed not to suffer any Lieberman-type takedown attempts. Which is precisely why Ford agreed to do this segment, I’m sure. If he has to grit his teeth for 20 minutes and pat Screw Them on the back to bring him to heel, hey.

Or am I giving him too much credit?

Note: Some of the segments have been edited for brevity.