The importance of Bernie....

[madfloridian]

is that now the Party insiders may start listening to the Party outsiders.

Crossposted in the Bernie Sanders forum.

One commentator called it governing class vs activist class.

The clash will be between the "governing class" and the "activist class."

From November 2004, Time Magazine.

What happens to the losing team

If there's a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, predicts Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a moderate advocacy group, it won't be the usual skirmish between the liberals and moderates of the professional political class in Washington but one between the Washington insiders on one side and the rank-and-file activists spread out across the country on the other. "What's changed over the past two years is that activist Democrats believe that Republicans are venal people," says Rosenberg. These activists "are going to be very intolerant of Democrats in Washington who cooperate with the Republicans. There's going to be tremendous pressure to stand up and fight and not roll over and play dead."

Well, it's happening.

Howard Dean really showed that hunger for truth in campaigns. And from a 2005 article in the NYT about triangulation.

The governing class and the activists

Nothing better illustrated the passing of the party's long ideological debate better than the explosive presidential campaign of Howard Dean (now the party's chairman), whose record as a pro-gun, pro-Democratic Leadership Council governor did nothing to prevent him from seamlessly assuming the role of chief spokesman for those liberal voters who had always embodied the so-called Democratic left.

What Dean's candidacy brought into the open, however, was another kind of growing and powerful tension in Democratic politics that had little to do with ideology. Activists often describe this divide as being between "insiders" and "outsiders," but the best description I've heard came from Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic operative who runs the advocacy group N.D.N. (formerly New Democrat Network), which sprang from Clintonian centrism of the early 1990's. As Rosenberg explained it, the party is currently riven between its "governing class" and its "activist class." The former includes the establishment types who populate Washington -- politicians, interest groups, consultants and policy makers. The second comprises "Net roots" Democrats on the local level; that is, grass-roots Democrats, many of whom were inspired by Dean and who connect to politics primarily online, through blogs or Web-based activist groups like MoveOn.org. The argument between the camps isn't about policy so much as about tactics, and a lot of Democrats in Washington don't even seem to know it's happening.

NOW they know something's happening.