By Madison Powers, Guest Columnist, CQ Staff

Fred Thompson is half right. There is a battle for the heart and soul of the party, and it’s being played out most conspicuously in the context of the South Carolina primary campaign right now.

The only part of Thompson’s observation that seems wrong to me is that he thinks the struggle is going on among the Republicans.

It’s the unmentioned fault-line within the Democratic Party that I think is being exposed in the recently heated wars between the rival camps. There is much more at the bottom of this than judgments about the candidates as individuals.

Many Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters not only think that Hillary would be a good president who would pursue progressive policies, they think that the people she will appoint to key positions and the people to whom she will turn to for both substantive policy advice and strategic counsel are part of her appeal. They think that she is backed up by a stable of veteran Washington insiders armed with battle-hardened insight, mature judgment, and a worldly wise perspective on both domestic and foreign policy options. Moreover, they are confident in the basic goodness and the reliability of the moral compass of the Clinton loyalists who are waiting in wings in Washington public relations firms, think tanks and universities. Clinton backers believe that those moral qualities, together with the battery of accumulated experience, will serve well both the party and the nation in the post-Bush era.

Many supporters of Barack Obama who comment online or on cable news programs — as well as most of those from whom I hear personally — appear to doubt all of the basic assumptions of the Clinton camp. Many Obama supporters give Sen. Clinton high marks individually. No one says she is not smart, nor that she is not herself a decent person, or denies that she has been a very good senator for New York. Such judgments prevail even among those who think her judgment was deeply flawed in backing the Iraq war authorization.

The largely unspoken truth is that many attracted to the Obama campaign don’t like or trust Clinton’s friends. Many think that the Clinton team is too cozy with Wall Street interests. The complaint is that the Clinton administration-in-waiting is ultimately too wedded to the narrowly incrementalist, sunbelt-born Democratic Leadership Conference ideology. The Clinton folks have learned their political lessons on the last battlefields perhaps, but in continuing to fight the last war they risk failing to notice that the successful campaign against the Republicans may well be based on something far different than the rapid response counter-attack and pre-emptive attack that has wearied so much of the electorate.

Rank-and-file Obama supporters have come to agree that Obama was right to ignore the pundits and media observers who counseled a harder hitting slugfest with Clinton in early debates or worried whether Obama looks tough enough to take on the Republicans. Much of the online blog criticism is that the politics of the trademark Clinton camp slash-and-burn politics finds it not only morally and aesthetically repugnant; their further worry seems to be that such strategies that have worked so well in the past misread the climate of opinion of today. Emblematic of that attitude is the fact that, for many, the least attractive moment in Obama’s public performances thus far was his New Hampshire debate quip “Hillary, I think you’re likeable enough.” The main complaint of many Democrats who otherwise, like the whole field of possible candidates, is directed toward a style of leadership within the Clinton camp and its stable of advisers and surrogates who appear to have grown smug, stale and out of touch with the emerging sensibilities of the voters.

In short, many critics of the Clinton wing of the party don’t trust that the old leadership team has the right stuff to serve her well enough in pursuit of policies that most admit differ very little among Clinton, Edwards and Obama. Many of the Obama-inspired upstarts want something that is not all that easy to say publicly, but which is undoubtedly obvious to the Clinton veterans: they want to change teams and not just the top of the ticket. The insurgent wing fears that the party under the Clinton era control has lost its way and sacrificed the moral compass that seemed to propel it in Bill Clinton’s first campaign.

Most importantly, perhaps is the worry that the timid incrementalism — what the Clinton camp would call “wisdom born of experience” — is the very thing likely to cause the Democrats to miss out on a historic opportunity to effect a seismic realignment of American politics more toward a left-center axis and away from the right-center axis that Bill Clinton exploited so effectively in the wake of the Reagan revolution. Obama himself has offered hints of this, and a few commentators have heard his sotto voce message.

Some dissatisfied Democrats, perhaps only inchoately, sense that this may be the time for some fundamental shift of the magnitude of the 1980 elections. Hillary Clinton might well win. But the uneasiness some feel about that otherwise attractive prospect is that she will work tirelessly for a far more humane and enlightened set of public policies, but that the risk of thinking small is that we will remain a 50-50 nation. The hope that Obama telegraphs in his speeches is that we might have a chance to move the center of gravity itself. Democrats now have to place their bets.

Madison Powers is a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.