Maureen Dowd picks up "a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution."

At the Democratic Convention.

There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks....

At a press conference with New York reporters on Monday, Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee.

“Remember, 18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack,” she said, while making a faux pro-Obama point. She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she’s been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama.

ADDED: Dowd ends her column with:

“I’m telling you, man,” said one top Democrat, “it’s something about our party, the shtetl mentality.”

Is the phrase "shtetl mentality" such common parlance that it can be used without explanation (and as the punchline of the whole column). A Google search for the term (in quotes, not just the two words) yields only 1,570 hits, and I clicked on a few without getting anything very useful. Perhaps it's more current chez NYT. I did a search on the NYT site. The top hit was today's Maureen Dowd column. So what else?

There's this, a 1988 letter from a rabbi criticizing something that had appeared in the newspaper:

[Do people fear] the image of Israeli soldiers defending themselves and their homeland threatens the security of Jews living in America? Indeed, if Jews abroad are cast as villains, Jews here become more vulnerable. The ''shtetl mentality'' is still part of the American Jew's psyche, timid and fearful of repercussions.

There's this, a recent article on Orthodox Jews and marriage:

“Matchmakers still have the idea that if you put two Jews together, it will work... But that’s a shtetl mentality. In the shtetl, what else did you know but your neighbor and your neighbor’s daughter? If you’re not sheltered, that’s not going to work. All we have are Marc Chagall paintings of that life. We’re not in the shtetl anymore.”

There's this:

''Bill Gates can't win,'' says Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation and a longtime adviser to Gates on the subject of philanthropy. ''It's like 19th-century anti-Semitism. If the Jews didn't mix into German society, people said they had a parochial, shtetl mentality. If they did mix, people said they were trying to pass. More important than why he's doing this is what he's doing. The proof will be in the pudding."

There's this, from a 1995 about the assassination of Yitzak Rabin:

The Zionists of the period of Israel's founding in 1948 were largely secular, sometimes even anticlerical, rejecting what they saw as a submissive, segregated shtetl mentality that allowed Jews to be slaughtered in the Holocaust. In the bustle of the early state, the religious were often looked down on as primitive.

Notice how all those examples include what is essentially a definition of the term, which seems to vary in meaning. Does it mean narrow-minded and insular or fatally blind to the danger of self-segregation? What was Dowd's "top Democrat" trying to say: That the Democrats are hunkering down in Denver but ultimately doomed?