McInturff has called these core Democrats "wacko," for ascribing motives other than national security to the president's case for military action -- oil, filial pride, a distraction from the economy and the seemingly futile search for Osama bin Laden. While acknowledging that Democratic primary voters -- particularly Iowa caucus attendees -- are more liberal and antiwar than voters as a whole, several Democratic consultants suggested that McInturff's poll was overstated and might even have been an attempt to spook their candidates. Charlie Cook, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, suggests that "the primary question Bill bases his analysis on is not a great question because it doesn't capture the public's nuances on the issue of Iraq." That said, Cook agrees that it effectively shows "how Democratic primary voters are different from other people just as Republican primary voters and caucus attendees do not in any way look like America either. That's what party bases are all about."

Nonetheless, these tensions played out at last week's DNC get-together, where the seven presidential candidates who spoke ran the political gamut on the pending war. There were the peaceniks like Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and former Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun. There was the feisty former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, who has spoken in favor of a war with multilateral United Nations support but opposed it on all other grounds. There was a cautious hawk, Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who supported the war but criticized the president's approach to it. (Kerry, recuperating from prostate surgery, seems to hold a similar stance.) And lastly, there were the pro-war Democrats, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo.

After Gephardt declared that he was "proud that I wrote the resolution" enabling the president to go to war, one Democrat in the audience yelled, "Shame!"

Regardless of the futility of his candidacy, Kucinich seemed to speak for a majority of conference attendees when he decried the war as "wrong," and said it would put "the lives of innocent people at risk" and "make the entire world less safe."

"From this meeting we will leave a party either divided by war or united in a sense of peace," the former mayor of Cleveland said on Saturday.

The day before, Dean sought to exploit those very divisions in his buzzy stemwinder of a speech -- which seemed to rouse the most audience applause -- when he began by angrily asking, "What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq!" This was no surprise; Dean has made a point of criticizing congressional Democrats for supporting that resolution, and for trying to copy the president in myriad other ways -- rallying around the Leave No Child Behind education act, offering a smaller but still sizable tax cut. Moreover, Dean implicitly slams Edwards and Kerry -- arguably the two front-runners -- for voting for the war resolution but allegedly speaking to activist groups as if they hadn't.

But Dean is not immune to questions of shifting positions himself; Associated Press White House reporter Ron Fournier reported that in an interview Dean "said he would not support sending U.S. troops to Iraq unless the United Nations specifically approves the move and backs it with action of its own. 'They have to send troops,' he said" last Friday. This seemed to contradict what Dean told Salon the week before, when he stated that if the United Nations ultimately didn't follow through on Resolution 1441's demand that Hussein disarm, he would have the U.S. issue Iraq a 60-day deadline after which he would support unilateral action.

Joe Trippi, campaign advisor for Dean, said that this was a matter of tenses -- that Dean doesn't support going into Iraq right now without U.N. approval. Trippi underlined that even if the U.N. ultimately didn't authorize force, Dean still wouldn't necessarily support a unilateral invasion unless he deemed Iraq an imminent threat, which he currently doesn't.

More glaringly muddled, of course, is Kerry. Last December on NBC's "Meet the Press," Kerry stated that he would "not support the president to proceed unilaterally" on Iraq, despite the fact that on Oct. 11 he voted in support of a war resolution that allows the president to do just that.

As befits the two men's personalities, Edwards seems to have less of an internal struggle going on, though his is not a dissimilar position. "I know a lot of you here don't agree with me on this, but I do believe Saddam Hussein must be disarmed," Edwards told the DNC members on Saturday, acknowledging that he was one of the 27 Democrats who supported the Iraq resolution. In an October speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Edwards said that on Iraq, members of the Bush administration "seem determined to act alone for the sake of acting alone" and referred to its attitude as "arrogance without purpose."

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