All the anger, anguish, and alarm over Carville's recent attacks on Dean and, by proxy, the netroots, while justified, miss that this is not only a defense of personal power, but an attack on the interests of the Democratic Party. After all, to suggest replacing the 50-state strategy, which has just proven so dramatically effective, with the old losing strategies, headed by Ford, Tuesday's only loser in a close race is a noble summons to leap off a cliff, or at least to break the tsunami. Which is what you would expect from someone of the ideological bent of Carville and his keepers, which is to say the Clintons. It is not simply a question of personal ambition, much less corruption. For a Democrat with a centrist agenda, it is simply not desirable that the Democratic Party have too much power.
While some races are still disputed, it's clear that the Democrats will end this election up about 35 seats in the House. According to the DLC webstie, there are 40 "New Democrats" in Congress. (that's probably the 109th Congress, so the number may be slightly higher in January, but the point remains). Although there is not a strict correspondence, I think it is reasonable to use the DLC as a market for "centrists" and especially for Carville, who is essentially a Clinton protege, and is probably doing the Clintons' work here.
The DLC constitutes less than 20% of the elected House, and its level of support from the public is probably lower than that. Yet the DLC membership exceeds the margin of the Democratic majority, giving them an easy veto over Democratic policy. They don't have to even vote against the Party to exercise this; they just have to abstain and let the Republicans defeat the measure. Note that this is not true of non-centrist groups of comparable size. The Congressional Black Caucus, for example, is slightly larger, but it does not have a veto because almost any veto it would be inclined to offer would be counteracted by Republican votes. These small group vetoes only work when one has the support from across the aisle, as the centrists would on most issues where they differ from the rest of the Party.
If the Democratic margin were to increase to 60 seats, however, and the centrists got a full 20% of the new seats, the centrists now would have only a 52-seat edge. Their votes would no longer be needed to pass legislation, and they would have to take the political risk of voting with the Republicans (that would still work if they were undivided, because it would not just be 52 votes less for the Democrats, but also 52 votes more for the Republicans). While it would take an unrealistically large Democratic majority to utterly deprive the centrists of veto power on issues where both they and the Republicans are united, their power actually diminishes as the size of the Democratic majority increases. And some issues that divide the Democrats are also likely to divide the Republicans - free trade, for example.
This is a structural consequence of the two-party system. The loyalties of centrists are always divided between the parties, as the majorities of the parties are seldom centrists, but centrists always belong to one or the other party. Short of abandoning the two-party system, I don't know what can be done about it (and, in some ways, the same dynamic is still present in multi-party systems), but it's something that should be kept in mind when evaluating the advice of centrists - their interest lies in narrow not large victories, and they can be expected to work against the party whenever it threatens to become too powerful.
And for those who find "traitor" too strong a word, we should realize that conflicted loyalties are part of life, and the notion that someone would be disloyal to a cause to which they profess allegiance is unremarkable. Loyalty is a complex thing, and deceit is in our basic evolutionary nature. We should just realistically recognize that people may have other objectives than maximizing the power of the Party and take this into account in evaluating what they say and do. And, in a sense, I am giving Carville credit here. I do not doubt that the accusations that he is protecting personal power also have truth, and I believe Woodward's claim that he has acted as a Bush mole, but there is also an ideological logic to his position, and we would do well to remember that.