“I’m appalled,” fumes U.S. Rep. and presidential hopeful Dean Phillips. “I’m disappointed. I’m disgusted that professionals who ostensibly have committed their entire careers to sharing truth and to providing facts and to sharing information with American voters … are fundamentally avoiding their responsibilities.”

Phillips is on the phone from icy New Hampshire, where he’s currently running 60 or so points behind President Joe Biden in Democratic primary polls. But he may as well be calling from the sidewalk outside MSNBC’s Capitol Hill studio, watching the fancy guests come and go, hoping in vain for Chris Hayes or Joy Reid or Jen Psaki to bring him in from the cold.

Phillips shouldn’t count on being ushered inside for hot cocoa anytime soon.

Since declaring his candidacy on Oct. 27, Phillips says, he hasn’t been interviewed once on the favorite network of his fellow Democrats. Ditto big Sunday shows. He’s been on CNN a handful of times, but never given the town-hall treatment afforded fellow single-digit candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie, both of whom happen to have challenged Donald Trump rather than Biden.

The only broadcast outlets that seem to want him, Phillips tells me, are the ones that deploy him as a way of tweaking the Democrats.

“Right media has been more than invitational,” Phillips says. By contrast, “I don’t think there’s an MSNBC viewer that even knows that I’m a congressman, because what’s being portrayed is designed to prevent that education.”

As an Ivy-educated businessman whose three terms representing suburban Minneapolis have established him as a solid mainstream legislator, though not a Capitol Hill big shot, Phillips isn’t accustomed to being treated as a marginal or kooky figure — someone like, say, the onetime spiritual guru Marianne Williamson (who actually leads him in several national Democratic polls). “They’re trying to convert me from a person of principle and........

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