WASHINGTON — Nancy Larson’s most difficult conversation was, by far, the one with Chelsea Clinton.
“It was just heartbreaking,” said Mrs. Larson, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota and more to the point, a superdelegate who had initially pledged herself to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. This was last Saturday, after the former first daughter learned that Mrs. Larson would be shifting her allegiance to Senator Barack Obama.
“She is a delightful young woman who loves her mother very much,” Mrs. Larson said. “She was really pushing me. She kept asking me why I was doing this. She just kept asking, ‘Why? Why?’ ”
It is a question many in the Clinton camp are asking these days, sometimes in conversations far less civil than that one. After nearly two decades building relationships with a generation of Democrats, Mrs. Clinton has recently suffered a steady erosion of support for her presidential campaign from the party stalwarts that once formed the basis of her perceived juggernaut of “inevitability.”
Some of it is just business, practical politicians putting aside ties to the Clintons to follow the will of the voters in their states or making a calculation about who seems best positioned to win.
The immediate fallout, with the Pennsylvania primary only two days away, is electoral. Mrs. Clinton has been losing potential endorsers and superdelegate backing from grass-roots activists like Mrs. Larson as well as elected officials, party luminaries and former Clinton White House aides (the most recent being former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who endorsed Mr. Obama on Friday). It is the constituency that provided Mrs. Clinton with an early lead among superdelegates, one she retains although by a narrowing margin.
But there is something more wrenching at work as well, a reckoning of whether the Clintons, on balance, have been good or bad for the party. It has the feel of a very personal testing of loyalties to a former president who once always seemed to be adding to the “Friends of Bill” list, and to a sitting senator who, if not so driven as her husband to win over everyone, used her fame to help elect other Democrats.
But one person’s “disloyalty” is, to another set of eyes, well-deserved “comeuppance.” And there is no shortage of powerful Democrats who are quick to accuse the Clintons of defining loyalty as a one-way street, with little regard for the sacrifices they have made for a couple whose own political needs seem to their critics always to come first.
This tension was neatly distilled in a heated conversation in January between a prominent Clinton supporter and Cameron Kerry, the younger brother of Senator John Kerry, who had just endorsed Mr. Obama.
In the telling of two Democrats familiar with the discussion, one from each camp, the Clinton supporter, a Democratic fund-raiser with close ties to both Mrs. Clinton and John Kerry, noted that Mr. Clinton campaigned for Mr. Kerry in 2004, even though the former president had just undergone bypass surgery.
To which Cameron Kerry parried that his brother had agreed to fly with Mr. Clinton on Air Force One after the impeachment vote “when no one wanted to be seen with him.”
Either way, the anger felt by the Clintons and that directed at them goes to what many see as deep fractures and unresolved tensions within the Democratic Party.
“There is a lot of Clinton fatigue in the party and in the country today, and many people are reacting to that,” said Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader in the Senate, who is supporting Mr. Obama...........
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