One of the interesting things about the Blue Dogs is that very few of them are actually vulnerable. In fact, the Republicans don’t even appear to be overly eager to defeat most of them.
One of the Republican leaders in [Mike] Ross’s district, Garland County GOP Chairman Glenn Gallas, was less pessimistic about defeating Ross and suggested that the “political winds are blowing” for Tim Griffin, a Republican lawyer who was briefly a U.S. attorney for the state but resigned after the release of emails he’d sent about “caging” (sending mail to expired addresses as a way of challenging the residence of voters) during the 2004 election. But even Gallas did not think a strong Ross challenge was in the cards. “If you want to go super-big picture, there are much worse guys who need to be defeated.”
It doesn’t sound like Chairman Gallas’s heart is really in the fight to unseat Mike Ross. And I can kind of understand. I don’t really get excited about defeating Olympia Snowe. I like Olympia Snowe and I wish she had more moderate company in the Republican Party. But the Republicans can’t win back control of the House unless they clean out at least some of the Blue Dogs. Their only target-rich area is in the South. Southerners, for whatever reason, have not warmed up to our new president. More than half of them aren’t even sure the president is legally eligible for the job.
That makes it kind of hard for a southern Democrat to get reelected, don’t you think? There’s a reason that Rep. Parker Griffith (D-AL) just said he won’t vote for Pelosi as speaker next time around. It’s the same reason that Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK) declined to endorse Obama over McCain. Their constituents really don’t like having a black president and it’s making them insane. Well, that, and they’re deluged with right-wing hate radio all day long. Classic racist appeals are no longer tenable, so you don’t see too much of that anymore. Instead, you hear that Obama was born in Kenya and he wants to compel everyone to circumcise their children, and he wants to kill your grandma and all the veterans. They’ll say any fucking thing except what they’re really thinking. It almost makes me long for the days of Paula Jones and Troopergate and Whitewater and the Mena Airport and Vince Foster. Those lies at least had the aura of plausibility.
But I was talking about the Blue Dogs. And the way I see it, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for the Blue Dogs to go running away from Nancy Pelosi and the president. Not on health care anyway. When more than half your constituents don’t even believe that the president is a natural born citizen I think you need to show some tangible results to convince them to reelect a Democrat. The Democratic Party was pretty popular in Arkansas until Obama came along. The people there voted for Democrats for a reason, and I think health care was one of those reasons. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that the Democrats dominated the federal elections in Arkansas because they’re so good at protecting a women’s right to choose and pushing to end Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.
It shouldn’t be so hard to get the Blue Dogs to vote for Obama’s agenda. They really are pretty safe in their districts, and if that is going to change it isn’t going to be because Obama passed health care reform. In fact, the weaker Obama is, the more of a drag he’s going to be. The problem, as I see it, is that a lot of these Blue Dogs are really just Republicans who ran on the Blue ticket. They are thwarting the president because they don’t believe in the agenda of the national party. Political survival has little to do with it.