Ed Kilgore, in recognition of Eugene McCarthy's passing, observed:

But while Kusnet focuses on the temperamental aspects of the tradition that linked Adlai and McCarthy to such later liberal activist heroes as Mo Udall and Bill Bradley--candidates who sometimes conveyed the sense they were too good to actually win--I think there's a more obvious strain that runs from Stevenson to McCarthy to McGovern to Gary Hart to Paul Tsongas to Howard Dean (and could include Russ Feingold if he emerges as a major candidate in 2008). It's a tradition of candidates who expanded the Democratic appeal into previously Republican or independent upscale professional territory, but at the risk of losing touch with the old Democratic coalition of working-class and minority voters.

True enough. The interesting thing, to me, is that while all these men ran insurgent presidential campaigns, McCarthy and McGovern were insurgents from the "left" while Hart and Tsongas were waging "centrist" insurgencies. Dean was on the "left" again, but as governor of Vermont was controversial inside the party for being a "centrist" and, indeed, in the very early days of his campaign (think until some time late in 2002) was understood as a "centrist" insurgent in the Hart-Tsongas tradition. But these men aren't ideological antagonists, as Ed says there's a very clear sense in which they all belong to the same political tradition. Call them the "yuppie Democrats."

Obviously, the difference is that the "left" yuppies ran during wars and the "center" yuppies ran during peacetime. But they all were actually very similar politicians. Of the two "center" yuppies, one was dead by the time of the Iraq War, and the other was against it, just like "left" yuppies. Dean, meanwhile, genuinely did ditch some of his "centrist" positions during the campaign -- he flip-flopped on trade and abandonned his initial critique-from-the-right of NCLB and spun it as a critique-from-the-left -- but only did so after he was painted as a "left" insurgent and remained committed to balanced budgets and so forth.

The point being, that war matters a lot in politics when it matters at all. The same constellation of views that counts as "centrist" in peacetime becomes "leftwing" in wartime.

In some ways, this leads me to believe that people may be underestimating Russ Feingold's potential as a primary candidate. Unlike Dean, he has a real record as a labor liberal as well as his ties to the yuppie political tradition. In addition, we're seeing to some extent the yuppification of the labor movement and leadership roles are increasingly filled by highly educated labor lawyers rather than former shop stewards. Once Dean looked like he might win and demonstrated a willingness to make some policy concessions, some major unions were ready to endorse him. Feingold can pull off this off less awkwardly and perhaps more effectively.