The departure of the political consultant Hank Sheinkopf from the campaign of H. Carl McCall doesn’t bode well for the Democrat. The New York Post’s Frederic Dicker, who first reported the story, attributes Mr. Sheinkopf’s departure to an internal feud. He quoted campaign sources as saying the dismissal of the tough-talking, blue-collar-oriented Mr. Sheinkopf — an Orthodox Jew with strong outer-borough Democratic connections — resulted from a long-running battle with several of Mr. McCall’s liberal and left-of-center advisers. They include, he reported, Congressman Chas. Rangel; a former deputy to Mayor Dinkins, Bill Lynch, and Bronx Democratic ex-Chairman Roberto Ramirez. Our own sources add Hillary Clinton’s crony, Harold Ickes, to the list. “Firing Hank is basically saying the Manhattan liberals, the ultraleft relics of the 1960s, don’t want a guy around who has strong ties to the city’s Orthodox Jewish community,” Mr. Dicker quoted a source close to Mr. Sheinkopf as saying.

With Mr. Sheinkopf, Mr. McCall is severing a link to more than one community. He’s severing a link to a whole political tradition. In the current political context, Mayor Giuliani, though he is a Republican, can be seen as a right of center Democrat, or, as it was put to us, “Mario Procaccino without the racism.” Mayor Bloomberg can be seen as a left of center Democrat, or, as it was also put to us, “John Lindsay with management skills.” It would have been encouraging to see a liberal Democrat like Mr. McCall building bridges to the tradition for which Mr. Sheinkopf speaks. Now, in any event, Mr. McCall will be managed by Messrs. Ickes, said to have been one of the authors of the Democrats’ notorious Palestinian plank in the 1980s, and Lynch, who was criticized so pointedly in the official post-mortem on the Crown Heights riot. To whom is the constituency Mr. Sheinkopf represents going to look?

When we spoke with Mr. Sheinkopf yesterday, he was downplaying the significance of it all, particularly the notion that his departure points to any sort of anti-Semitism in Mr. McCall’s campaign. Mr. McCall, after all, has plenty of pro-Jewish bona fides, having invested the state’s pension funds in Israel and having gone so far as to test-fire a machine gun in an Israeli military training camp in the West Bank. Mr. Sheinkopf described the problems as having been personal and nothing more. It may be that the real story of the McCall campaign is that the comptroller is the end of a generation in which politics were built on coalitions that can no longer exist. This is not about Hank Sheinkopf but about the politics that people wish did exist, where multiple ideologies could fit comfortably in the same room. The failure of Mr. McCall to make room in his campaign for someone like Mr. Sheinkopf raises concerns about what kind of advisory group he would put together were he installed at Albany.