Steven Taylor links a piece in today’s New York Times that looks at Terry McAuliffe’s plan to create a consensus nominee by front-loading the primary calendar. The plan looks likely to backfire by producing a presumptive nominee who is, according to writer Adam Nagourney, “bruised by the nominating fight and confronted with the challenge of uniting a deeply divided party.”

It doesn’t exactly help that many of the candidates’ strategies have, of late, focused on pitting Democratic factions against each other, with Clark’s recent attempts to play to African-Americans against Dean, Gephardt’s appeals to the unions, and Dean’s nonsensical—and continual—alienation of the party’s centrist and conservative elements.