The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party

It is no secret that the Democratic Pary has been split into two factions -- the "insiders" who have run the party the past decade, and the Howard Dean/Joe Trippi "reformer" faction.

The New Republic's Ryan Lizza has had some of the best coverage of the primary campaign, and has an eye-opening and extremely important look at this growing rift. The piece is subscription-only, but TNR was kind enough to offer the dKos community a free link to the article. It is clearly one of the most important reads of the year.

The division in the party over Dean is less about ideology than about power. Three years after Bill Clinton left office, he and Hillary still control what remains of a Democratic establishment. Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was installed by Clinton. Most of the powerful new fund-raising groups, known as 527s, and the new think tanks, such as the Center for American Progress, are run by the best and brightest of the Clinton administration. As National Journal noted in a detailed look at what it called "Hillary Inc.," the senator's network of fund-raising organizations "has begun to assume a quasi-party status." And some of the best Clinton talent is heavily invested in non-Dean campaigns, especially Joe Lieberman's (Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn), John Edwards's (Bruce Reed), and Wesley Clark's (Bruce Lindsey, Eli Segal, and Mickey Kantor).

Dean, by contrast, has come to represent the party's anti-establishment forces. While the other candidates, especially former self-styled front-runner John Kerry, started the campaign by wooing party leaders, Dean built a grassroots army first--in part by bashing D.C. Democrats and their disastrous 2002 election strategy--and is only now leveraging his fund-raising power to win over establishment types. No Democrats closely associated with the Clintons are working for the Dean campaign. In fact, it's hard to find a Clintonite who speaks favorably of the former Vermont governor. This evident schism is not just about Dean's opposition to the war--or even his prospects in the general election. It's a turf war to decide who will control the future of the party.