The fact of the matter is Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both establishment candidates. Obama's establishment just happens to be a little younger and less entrenched than Clinton's establishment. She's got the agency heads, he's got their frustrated deputies. Sometimes, this is because the deputies liked him better. Other times, it's because they realized he was their best chance for advancement (one of the dynamics that played out in Washington last year was that a lot of Clinton's alliances were already set, and so folks who weren't already in the inner circle threw their lot in with Obama simply on careerist grounds). But either way, the difference is intra-establishment. Both candidates, after all, are Senators, which except in very idiosyncratic cases (Russ Feingold, Tom Coburn, Bernie Sanders) makes them definitionally part of the establishment. If Biden or Dodd had roared to the front of the pack, the establishment would have also supported them. Governors are often able to escape the "establishment" label simply because they don't live here, and thus don't know the establishment well enough to attract their support early in the campaign. That's not a function of them being courageous renegades so much as it has to do with where they take their mail. In their own states, after all, they are the establishment. Conversely, John Edwards was an establishment favorite in 2004, but actually wasn't in 2008, as in the interim much of the DC establishment decided they hated him.
