From today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

Although their views on the core issue of preserving abortion rights are identical, their styles and strategies are wildly different. Judging from their statements so far, [California senators Barbara] Boxer and [Dianne] Feinstein appear likely to split on the nomination of Judge John Roberts.
Their strikingly divergent approaches, analysts say, reflect a deeper divide within the Democratic Party over how to handle the Roberts nomination while trying to win back the White House and Congress.
Boxer is an agitator from the left who threatened in a speech in San Francisco this month to “use all the parliamentary tools I’ve been given as a U.S. senator” to delay a vote on Roberts if necessary, stopping just short of threatening a filibuster.
Feinstein is a moderate who, the day after he was nominated, declared Roberts safe from filibuster barring some shocking revelation….
Feinstein left her first private meeting with Roberts last month singing his praises. “I don’t think there’s anybody on the court quite like he will be,” she said, describing him as “very impressive” and exuding “humility and modesty.”…
Feinstein was notably absent — as was Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln, another moderate — from a press conference last month where seven of the Senate’s nine Democratic women announced a Web site — democrats.senate. gov.askroberts — for citizens to provide the senators questions to ask the nominee at his hearings.

See page 2 for another tidbit from this article indicating the left’s agreeement (Carville) that its agenda isn’t politically winnable, including it’s radical position on abortion:

Also from aforementioned August 19 San Francisco Chronicle article:

Since her November election to a third term, Boxer “has tracked to the left, freed from the constraint of trying to get re-elected and I think also energized by the example of the Howard Dean candidacy,” said Bruce Cain, a UC Berkeley political scientist and incoming director of the UC Center in Washington. “She’s carved out a role for herself as a spokesperson for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.”
A recent focus group of rural voters in Wisconsin and Arkansas by Democracy Corps, a polling firm run by Democratic strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, found that Democrats are well positioned to address voter concerns over the Iraq war, job security and health care costs. Their Achilles heel is the social issues that promise to be the focus of the Roberts hearings.
“As powerful as the concern over these issues is, the introduction of cultural themes — specifically gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit and the role of religion in public life — quickly render them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the national level,” the report said.
Some Democrats — Cain counts Feinstein among them — “don’t want to look like they’re opposing someone who’s a reasonable candidate. They want to keep the Democratic Party on a centrist path.”