Expect Team Hillary to make a big, big deal out of this: David Axelrod, chief strategist for the Obama campaign, tells NPR, “The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years. This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those votes.”

Bill Clinton’s already swinging away at that.

One of the things that makes this division in the Democratic ranks so intense is that each side of this demographic divide would prefer to win with as minimal help from the other side as possible. Read the pro-Obama blogs; their comments drip with contempt for the demographics in Hillary’s coalition – the elderly, unions, Catholics, the white working class, etc. They see these folks as more socially conservative, resistant to radical change, and holding back the party from embracing its true progressive ideals.

(One other wrinkle – your average liberal blogger thinks our Middle East policy is way too deferential to Israel’s interests, and bristles at what they see as pandering to Jewish voters, such as promising to “obliterate” those who would attack the Jewish state.)

Meanwhile, the white working class, the elderly and Catholic tend to look at the Obama coalition – the young activists, African-Americans, and the latte-sipping university professors – with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust. All this talk of ethereal “change” and not enough how you’ll help put more food on the table.

Also, heard from a smart conservative strategist a day or so ago… this is what happens when your party is made up of groups that want government to do things for them (and spend time and resources) vs. when your party is made up of groups that want government to get off their backs and go away.

Government dollars, even with high tax rates, are finite. Sooner or later, a dollar has to be spent on either environmental protection or worker retraining programs, on scholarships or on expanding Social Security, on government-run health care or foreign aid, on infrastructure programs or on open space preservation. Sooner or later, a Democratic leader can only split the difference so much, and more resources will go to one instead of the other. Someone will feel shortchanged, resentments will build. Besides money, there’s the finite resource of time, focus, and energy of lawmakers.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, you have social conservatives who want government to stop distributing condoms in schools and preventing their children from praying; you have home schoolers who want to teach their kids on their own without government interference; you have gun owners who want to keep their guns; you have entrepreneurs who want fewer regulations, and you have taxpayers who want their taxes low. Grover Norquist called this the “Leave Me Alone Coalition.” Only when you run into a gun owner who wants to distribute condoms in schools do you run into a problem… or something like Terry Schiavo, which pit the pro-life and small-government wings against each other.

It happens on the GOP side, but that’s a result of circumstances. On the Democratic side, it’s “baked in the cake” in the way their party is set up.