The election of liberal administrations in Washington in recent decades has followed a now familiar pattern. On the campaign trail, Democrats run to the left of how they actually govern: pledging programs and initiatives that become conspicuously marginal or absent even when the party wields unified control of the federal government. There are various explanations for this: organized opposition to these initiatives, particularly from corporate interests, being incredibly strong, and lax campaign finance laws giving tremendous latitude to those looking to defeat progressive legislation — to say nothing of the generally obstructive nature of America’s political institutions.

Still, the process of Democratic Party capitulation is often conceived in relatively straightforward and binary terms. Democratic leaders, so the theory goes, fundamentally want to carry out the agendas they campaign on but are persistently thwarted by a system that makes doing so incredibly difficult. Political campaigns, after all, require money and lots of it. And who has more money than an activist corporate sector that may otherwise align itself even more strongly with the Republican right?

The problem with this view of things is that it still implies there’s a clear division to be drawn between private special interests and public-spirited officials. The DC swamp, however, is more accurately thought of as an ecosystem in which the line between public and private is blurred and such distinctions are sometimes quite difficult to draw. Perhaps nothing underscores this reality more dramatically than the intermediary enterprise of political consulting, the subject of an extensive and revealing investigation recently published by the Intercept’s Alex Weatherhead.