Dems get a clue? From the Legal Times:

Liberal interest groups could not have imagined that they’d be on the outside looking in during what was supposed to be a battle over President George W. Bush’s first Supreme Court nominee.
But that’s what has essentially happened, as Senate Democrats chart a more moderate course without them.
“Why do we have to fight? Just to fight?” asks one Democratic staffer. “Perhaps we should just declare victory and move on,” he says, noting that Judge John Roberts Jr. is almost certainly better than other people whom Bush might have been expected to nominate, such as U.S. Court of Appeals Judges J. Michael Luttig and Janice Rogers Brown.
“Do we have to follow Nan Aron off a cliff?” he adds, referring to the veteran judicial campaigner who heads up the Alliance for Justice.
For Senate Democrats, the apparent disavowal of longtime shoulder-to-shoulder allies such as the Alliance for Justice and People For the American Way can be viewed as a political move, a bid to appeal to the mainstream.
That has left those interest groups with a similar choice: whether to join their Democratic brethren and perhaps burnish their own credibility with moderates, or to ratchet up the rhetoric over a nominee who seems a sure bet to be confirmed in order to fire up their liberal base — and risk alienating everyone else.