Michael Crowley's essay, The Kerry Tribes: The seven factions fighting for control of his campaign and his presidency is oversimplified and at times a little kooky, but he seems to "get" my meme that there are counter-forces in the Kerry organization that need to be rallied and given the vision to isolate and pin down the Holbrooke-Berger-Beers crowd within the U.S. opposition candidate's organization.

Crowley posits seven "tribes" in the Kerry campaign (really, you can collapse them into three groups - Kerry people, Kennedy people, and Clinton people, with lots of intersecting currents - as I will in a moment), but it's still fun to peruse Crowley's observations and gang nicknames:

• The Kennedy Militia
• The Boston Fixers
• The Kerry Clan
• The D.C. Fixers
• The Clintonites (Holbrooke, Berger, Beers included)
• The Kerry Loyalists
• Band of Brothers

First off, you can fold the Clan (family), the Loyalists (longtime friends and counselors) and the "Band of Brothers" (Nam Vets) into a reasonably shared political worldview, with long intersecting working relations and loyalties, and high on the political consciousness end (in other words, much closer to the Kennedy worldview than the Clinton one).

The category of "Boston Fixers" is the bridge between that first group and the Kennedy people... Again, longstanding collaborative relations intersecting with these former Dukakis aides and both the Kerry and Kennedy people.

(As to where the group he calls "DC fixers" lines up, Crowley mentions only four names, and it's the only bunch that I don't personally have any experience with. Glad he flagged them. I'll start watching more carefully. "Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall, for he who gets hurt, will be he who has stalled," got it, boys?)

And then you've got those Clinton assholes over in the corner (and the worst of the Clinton crowd!), making a mess of everything. And until the Kennedy and Kerry people realize that there is a problem - because they're the ones so busy out there trying to win an election that they're not paying enough attention to these policy worms in their apple - the Clintonite cancer could spread and kill the patient.

But in the end, once the "dog hunters" in that last "Band of Brothers" category who save every damn venture of Kerry's from the jaws of defeat realize the problem with these beltway bureaucrats, this is just my personal opinion and experience: my money's on them to kick some serious aspiring war criminal ass among those foreign policy coupsters. Hey, soldiers: just whistle if you need back-up.