General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Chafee and Webb announced. [View all]Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)In the Democratic Party as a whole, not all that many (Hillary is much more vulnerable on her left flank than on her right).
On DU, even fewer.
Many DUers are OK with or even enthusiastic about the prospect of Hillary as the nominee. Of the many DUers who are not in that camp, all or virtually all want someone to Hillary's left. That's why there's enthusiasm for Sanders and Warren, who both meet that criterion, and who attract attention even though they are, respectively, not an enrolled Democrat and not likely to run.
O'Malley has attracted "love" (your term) because the progressives see him as someone who could carry the left-of-Hillary banner. The most frequent comment about O'Malley among those not cheering for Hillary seems to be "I don't know much about that guy but what little I've heard seems positive and I'd like to know more." (The most frequent comment about him among the Hillary supporters is to not comment. This is in keeping with Hillary's 2006 primary campaign, when she faced a progressive challenger with much less name recognition. She ignored him and refused to debate.)
With that landscape in mind, I turn to your question. (I realize that it wasn't a serious attempt to gain information but for expository purposes I'll pretend it was.) Webb is perceived as being more conservative than Hillary. That has two consequences:
(1) He doesn't attract support from the DUers who want an alternative to Hillary, because we want someone who's less conservative, not more so.
(2) He doesn't attract attention from the DUers interested in forecasting the race, because, as someone coming at Hillary from the right, he doesn't seem to have much potential. At this point I see Hillary as the heavy favorite to win the nomination, but if she doesn't win it, her successful opponent will almost certainly be someone who mobilizes the left wing of the party and gets the votes of those who consider Hillary too conservative.
Chafee is a more complicated case. One obvious reason for the lack of "love" is that his first public expression of interest in the race came much more recently. We've been discussing Clinton/O'Malley/Sanders/Warren/Webb for months with no Chafee on the radar. Even people like Gore and a couple of Browns received more attention than Chafee until the last few weeks.
Beyond that, his ideology is harder to pin down. He was a legacy Republican, son of a prominent moderate Republican who would have been far to the left of today's GOP. He had some liberal impulses. As a result, his Senate record is a mixture; opposing IWR isn't his only progressive act, but he also has a lot of party-loyalty votes for bad things. As a further complication, he has clearly moved to the left since leaving the Senate.
The upshot of all this is that it was clearly predictable that Chafee's emergence would not produce an immediate stampede of DUers to support him. People know even less about him (about where he is today) than they do about O'Malley.
I'm guessing that the point of the OP was to try to convey the impression that anyone who isn't loudly cheering for Hillary is therefore a mindless hater with no real interest in a constructive alternative, because otherwise those of us who don't want Hillary to win the nomination would be leaping to support Chafee or Webb. If that's your point, it's a complete non sequitur. If your point is something else, maybe you could spell it out a little less obliquely, for the benefit of those of us who are a bit slow on the uptake.