...antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather make an apology she did not believe in.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to chose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).

At the same time, the level of Democratic anger has surprised some of her allies and advisers, and her campaign is worried about how long it will last and how much damage it might cause her.

Apparently, Carville-Matalin have advised her that it is worse to be seen as a flip-flopper than to make virtually every anti-war activist into a personal enemy. And it isn't strictly anti-war democrats she has alienated, but the entire Howard Dean campaign from 2004 and anyone that has worked on the ground on Dean's 50 State Strategy. Here's a modified transcript of scottinamerica's recent conversation with Paul Begala.

scottforamerica:I hope you will support the 50-state strategy.

Begala: That depends what you mean by 50 state strategy.

scottforamerica: I mean the plan for Democrats to compete everywhere and for every office in the country.

Begala: That I don’t support. We should start with principles and values. Sure, we should compete everywhere, but that’s not the right strategy. After working for over 30 campaigns this cycle, not a single one of those campaigns was helped by the 50-state strategy. Name examples where the 50-state strategy helped us win in 2006.

scottforamerica: Kentucky and Indiana, along with progress in Nebraska and Kansas.

Begala: Look, when we started there were only about 15 competitive races, but Rahm made the field over 35 by the end and that had nothing to do with the 50-state strategy.

scottforamerica: We never would have had so many competitive districts if not for the DNC investing staffers and resources into those states early on and expanding the playing field.

Begala: So you have people out there, what are they doing there though?

scottforamerica: the're building a long term infrastructure for the Democratic Party, and we had people all over America knocking on doors and spreading the Democratic message.

Begala: So what do they say when they knock on the doors then?

scottforamerica: They had a succinct 6 point plan for a "new direction" that they were discussing, a cohesive message that we haven’t had in the past.

Begala: Anyway, I don’t need some a**hole from Vermont telling me what to do.

That pretty much sums up how the Hillary campaign sees the party activists. Their entire worldview has been preserved in amber since January 19th, 2001. They've shown no vision. They've shown no leadership. They are 'surprised' at the level of anger people have over Hillary's vote on the war? Maybe they should have had Peter Daou read them any one of a hundred diaries at Daily Kos that appear each day.

“She is in a box now on her Iraq vote, but she doesn’t want to be in a different, even worse box — the vacillating, flip-flopping Democratic candidate that went to defeat in 2000 and ’04,” said one adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “She wants to maintain a firmness, and I think a lot of people around her hope she maintains a firmness. That’s what people will want in 2008.”...

...She has argued to associates in private discussions that Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry lost, in part, because they could not convince enough Americans that they were resolute on national security, the associates said.

Keep up with the Maggie Thatcher crap...don't go all wobbly on us, Hillary. Actually...she's right. It's way too late. We've been watching her team piss all down our backs for years now and we don't believe it's raining. We won't believe it's sunny if she suddenly stops having them piss all over us. She should call for a draft and seven more divisions for Iraq. Then we'd know how resolute she is.