I like anti-Blue Dog rants as much as the next guy, but now that we’re in the minority in the House, we have to devise strategies to win back a lot of their seats. We also face the grim reality that the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling isn’t going to be overturned and no new campaign finance law is going to pass. So, more than ever, we are going to be either competing for corporate cash or swamped by it, or both.
It’s beginning to feel like that whole mid-20th Century liberal coalition was only made possible by a deal with the devil of segregation. So long as Democrats looked the other way at Jim Crow, southern politicians would give us their votes for New Deal policies. But once the Democrats got serious about enforcing civil rights for blacks the deal was off. All of a sudden, the southern Democrat was all about pro-business policies and fiscal conservatism. Part of this is just the anti-Washington sentiment that forced-desegregation created in the South. But part of it is that modern Democrats in the South can’t compete financially because their constituents are too culturally conservative for them to appeal to traditional liberal political action committees, and local Dems are poorer than in the North. Therefore, they see no alternative to getting their money from the business end of things. Moveover, their best strategy for avoiding getting taken out in wave elections is to accumulate massive war chests. In good times, this can dissuade potential challengers, and in bad times it gives them a fighting chance.
Add to this, that in conservative-leaning areas of the country, almost all political speech is of the Rush Limbaugh/Michael Savage variety, and you can see why Blue Dogs behave the way they do. On Tuesday, these problems cropped up not only in the South, but throughout rural and suburban areas of the midwest, Pennsylvania, and New York.
We can’t pretend that all we have to do is nominate more populist candidates to win these seats back. We have to figure out how to fund those candidates and how to help them get their message out. If we don’t, some of these seats will never come back, and others will only be winnable with more candidates who will never be there for us when it counts.