Just out of curiosity, why do the Dems think that convincing a journalist not to run the Reid "Negro" quote was so plausible?

Why do these guys think that they could have convinced the reporters not to use the explosive quote? How would they have convinced the reporters not to use it?

On Friday at 10 p.m. — half a year after the interview — The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder e-mailed Reid’s staff with questions about a “light-skinned” candidate without a “Negro dialect.”

In the second-guessing that followed, Capitol Hill veterans said there was no way that such inflammatory words from a Senate majority leader would remain off the record, even if that had been the arrangement.

But because Manley had not sounded an internal alarm, he and the rest of the damage-control squad were caught flat-footed by Ambinder’s e-mail, several people close to the situation told POLITICO.

“They could have had weeks to prepare for this or to try to convince Halperin not to run it,” said a Democrat who participated in some of the damage control.