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Mutualist Kevin Carson:

New Class progressivism continued to flourish among welfare statists after WWII; it heavily influenced both interest group pluralism and neo-conservatism, and the shadowy borderlands in-between [...] The most notable modern descendant of the “progressive” social engineer, by the way, is Hillary Clinton. Her ideal government is a giant matriarch, like Godzilla in an apron, who constantly chants “Momma don’t allow, Momma don’t allow”–all to protect us from ourselves, of course. Or as Joseph Stromberg wrote, “the body of Leviathan and the head of a social worker.” Those who view Hillary as a radical leftist are delusional. A woman who made a 10,000% profit in cattle futures and served as a director of Wal-Mart, is hardly a threat to the power of the ruling class. She and her ilk just want to protect upper middle class soccer moms with SUVs and cell phones from any underclass disruption of their white bread suburban world.

Nick Bradley, writing for the paleolibs at LewRockwell.com:

So, is Obama a left-libertarian? No; Obama’s platform is more akin to “Soft Paternalism”, a gentler, less threatening approach to controlling people’s lives (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Libertarian Paternalism).

In the grand scheme of things, Obama is far less statist than Hillary (socialism at home, hegemony abroad) and McCain (fascism at home, endless warfare abroad). If Obama wins the democratic nomination, I suspect he’ll run with Bill Richardson (who likes market solutions on pragmatic grounds as well) [...] Don’t get me wrong: in a hypothetical match up in the fall between Obama and McCain, I’ll either abstain from voting or write in Paul’s name. But for the electorate as a whole, Obama would be the more liberty-minded choice over the statist, warmongering, ill-tempered and possibly unstable John McCain.

So to reiterate: the left-libertarian finds Clinton unacceptable. The right-libertarian grudgingly admits Obama is not the Devil. This, in a nutshell, is the difference between these campaigns, and it perhaps gives some insight into why the hate. Make no mistake, there is more than one battle at stake here. Not only are the Democrats fighting for the presidency, but factions fight for ascendancy in the Democratic Party. The question is simple — will this party finally acknowledge the Libertarian Democrat, or will it make the same mistakes of the past?.