ON AUGUST 16, ELIZABETH Edwards, the wife of the failed vice presidential candidate, sent out an email. She urged recipients to sign an online petition in support of Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a 24-year-old soldier who was killed in Iraq last year. Since August 6, Sheehan has been camped outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, demanding to meet with the president to discuss American withdrawal from the Middle East. Democrats, Edwards wrote, should support "Cindy's right to be heard." Democrats, she continued, should "listen to Cindy."

Two days after Edwards's email, in an appearance at a "listening session" in Marquette, Wisconsin, Democratic senator Russell Feingold announced his "target date"--December 31, 2006--for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. "I am putting a vision of when this ends on the table in the hope that we can get the focus back on our top priority," Feingold said, "and that is keeping America and the American people safe." Three days later, in an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, Feingold offered his analysis of the current political scene: "The Democrats are making the same mistake they made in 2002," he said, "to let the administration intimidate them into not opposing this war."

At first blush, Feingold's attempt at revisionism seems a doozy--it's well understood, if not universally agreed, that Democrats lost in 2002, and again in 2004, because of the public's perception that they were weak on national security. Besides which: Feingold is himself proof--along with Sheehan, Edwards, and a whole host of others--that no one is being "intimidated" into silence. Quite the opposite, in fact.

And yet Feingold should not be dismissed. He is just the latest sign that the antiwar wing of the Democratic party is resurgent, that the fault line that appeared between the party's hawks and doves in 2002 still has not been bridged, and that a growing divide between leadership and committed supporters threatens to bring the whole Democratic edifice tumbling down.

Some Democrats, of course, have been adamantly antiwar since the vote to authorize force against Iraq in October 2002. But the terms of the debate within the party are changing. During the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, the central argument was over whether the Iraq war was justified in the first place. Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman both said it was, Howard Dean said it wasn't, and John Kerry said . . . well, he said something in between.

Today, though, the central argument is over how soon American forces should leave Iraq, and whether the United States should set a schedule for withdrawal. On one side are former presidential candidate General Wesley Clark ("It would . . . be a mistake to pull out now, or to start pulling out or to set a date certain for pulling out") and some of the party's most prominent senators, including minority leader Harry Reid ("A timeline . . . only empowers those who don't want us there"), Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Joe Biden ("A deadline for pulling out . . . will only encourage our enemies to wait us out"), Hillary Clinton ("I don't think we should be setting a deadline"), Indiana's Evan Bayh ("To cut and run at this juncture would be a terrible mistake"), and Lieberman ("The coalition should not create an arbitrary timetable to withdraw forces from Iraq"). There is also former president Bill Clinton, who is perhaps still the most important politician in the Democratic party, and who as recently as August 11 told CNN that, "whether it was a mistake or not, we are where we are, and we ought to try to make this strategy succeed."