Volume 56, Number 19 · December 3, 2009
Who Are the Blue Dogs?By Michael Tomasky
A crucial fact about today's Congress, and one that even many politically astute observers may not fully appreciate, rests in the vast ideological differences between the two congressional parties. I don't mean by this that the Democrats have become uniformly liberal and the Republicans uniformly conservative , which is the standard grievance issued by the press, but rather that only the latter has happened—and that it has happened with surprising speed.
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To summarize, then, the Republican House delegation is far more concentrated today in its two regions of strength, the South and the Great Plains, than it was in 1989. Then, 22 percent of its members came from the states of the old Confederacy. Today, 35 percent do. And as the GOP has retreated, the House Democrats—after their own period of retrenchment from 1994 until 2006—have grown. The Democrats gained in their Northeast redoubt, though only by fourteen seats. The Democrats' largest percentage gains have come in the mountain states, where their representation has almost doubled, from nine to seventeen. And in stark contrast to the Republicans' pitiful performance in the Northeast, the Democrats have managed to hold more than fifty seats in the South, and they are not limited to districts that are urban, with a majority of African-Americans or Hispanics.
What this means is that the Democratic congressional party has become far more ideologically diverse than the Republican one. In theory, and sometimes in practice, this can be a good thing. But it means that Democrats simply can't act with the kind of unanimity one sees among Republicans. There is too much disagreement within the caucus.
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To look at the Blue Dogs' voting records as scored by the various interest groups, they don't always stand out as particularly conservative. Herseth Sandlin, for example, earned a 90 percent score from Americans for Democratic Action in 2007. Hill received a 91 from the American Civil Liberties Union in 2008.
Many of the group's members are actually fairly liberal on a range of matters. It's when the big issues take center stage, especially ones that pit government spending against deficit reduction, that the Blue Dogs bark.... snip
That these blue politicians represent red districts is a fact to which the party leadership is usually sensitive. Reacting to the stimulus vote, a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: "Many of the districts are more conservative, and they campaigned on fiscal responsibility, and we understand that."<3> Indeed the degree of understanding may have gone even further. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, considered one of the coalition's more serious legislators, said in a radio interview in early February that he was given leave by the White House to vote against his party's House leadership. "Well, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I actually got some quiet encouragement from the Obama folks for what I'm doing," said Cooper.<4>
The political truth is that the Democrats now have exactly forty votes to spare in passing legislation. The speaker's staff, and of course the members themselves, know very well which members can most, and least, afford to cast a vote that might be seen in their districts as too liberal. The stimulus, during Obama's honeymoon period, was comparatively easy to get through Congress. On an issue like the cap-and-trade bill to control carbon emissions, matters became far trickier. Forty-four Democrats opposed the legislation—that is, it would have failed without the eight Republicans who supported it (Pelosi's staff knew they had these eight and so were able to release more Democrats to vote no). Twenty-nine Blue Dogs opposed the bill. Collin Peterson, who represents a largely rural Minnesota district, struck a bargain over the bill with California's Henry Waxman that led several other Blue Dogs to vote for it—and led many advocates to complain that it had been indefensibly watered down, which was the reason several liberal Democrats, such as Ohio's Dennis Kucinich, opposed the measure.
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The final House bill, which Pelosi unveiled on October 29, also reflected the leadership's fear of a Blue Dog revolt. It contained a public option, but a weak one, tied not to Medicare reimbursement rates as liberals had hoped but based on negotiated reimbursements. The Blue Dogs preferred this—as the insurance industry surely does—and moderate Democrats stood firm against a "robust" public option as the leadership made its final "whip counts" in advance of releasing a bill.
One study that came out over the summer found that the coalition's political action committee had raised more money in the first six months of 2009 than in the entire two-year 2003–2004 period—$1.1 million, with nearly $300,000 of that coming from the health care industry.
So the Blue Dogs have evidently triumphed on the question of the public option.
Their resistance to it always had at its core a contradiction. Their great concern is cost containment, and no more effective cost-container has been proposed than the robust public option; yet many were against it. There is also the fact that as a group, the Blue Dogs tend to represent districts that are poorer—districts where more people could really benefit from a public option. And this is where their concerns have frankly quite often come across as less substantive than political or electoral.
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Such concessions to members of their caucus by the Democratic leaders are the price of aspiring to be a genuinely national party. The congressional Republicans are unified, all right. But they are reduced to an ideological and regional faction and seem intent on "purifying" the party even more—the forces that backed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman against Democrat Bill Owens in upstate New York vow to run conservative challengers in GOP primaries against alleged moderate apostates. If the Democrats are eventually to increase their majority, the only place to increase it is in districts that are currently red, or at best "purple."
Thus the paradox that a larger Democratic majority, at least in the House, will likely make for a somewhat more conservative one. The Blue Dogs will long be with us.
—November 5, 2009
link:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23432
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