The fact that congressional Democrats are feuding with the White House isn't exactly news, but I did find a couple of tidbits in a Politico article about friction between Obama and Sen. Chuck Schumer to be rather revealing of the internal dynamics of the elected Democrat officials.

Schumer had proposed modifying the tax proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts only on people making more than a million dollars a year, which in his estimation, would have undercut the Republican argument about small business and forced them to defend 'tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires". Obama was unimpressed, pointing out, in his new pragmatism, that it would have a chilling effect on the stock market among other effects. Than came this:

...privately, White House officials, who have long viewed Schumer as a talented but essentially self-promotional operator with no abiding loyalty to Obama, think he was pursuing an irresponsible partisan fight that would delay the tax cuts and the extension of unemployment benefits for months. And Obama himself warned Schumer that the millionaire strategy could sink the stock market.

That's a pretty incredible dynamic being described here. While its reasonable to expect that administration officials would be necessarily loyal to the President and his political agenda, Chuck Schumer is an elected official from the state of New York, and thus presumably entirely justified in putting the interests of his state before the interests of the President. Apparently that's considered a character defect within the Democrat party these days.

Yet Schumer has his own considerable blind spot, betraying a rather enormous sense of personal entitlement.

"Sen. Schumer says he wants a fight? He couldn't hold his caucus together," an anonymous White House official told ABC’s Jake Tapper earlier this week.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said as much on Nov. 30, when a reporter asked whether Schumer’s proposal could be the basis for a bipartisan compromise. “I don’t, quite frankly ... I don’t see that it has moved any Republican[s],” Gibbs said.

A person close to Schumer said he was “surprised” and found it “unprofessional” that the White House was “taking shots” at him.

Why the hell not? The President takes shots at plumbers for crying out loud. If there has been any signal change in style between the Bush and Obama White Houses, its been the Obama administration unabashed willingness to single out any and all critics for personal destruction. Sen. Schumer apparently believes this is entirely appropriate for Republicans, cheeky citizens and insufficiently compliant bloggers, but damn it, Chuck's a Senator!

There is a subtle but undeniable connection between character, philosophy and action, and here, in the unguarded reactions of two major players in the Democrat party is demonstrable proof of that relationship.