Don’t cry for the Blue Dogs:
Compared to the 2006 and 2008 cycles, when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sought a cadre of Blue Dog Democrats to re-take the House, there aren’t nearly as many self-identified Blue Dogs set to run this time around. And that fact is causing some consternation.
An aide close to the Blue Dogs told The Fix that the group “is not happy with DCCC’s progress in recruiting moderates.” Added the aide: “The recruiting that we’ve done, we’ve done ourselves.”
The aide did say that the committee is starting to come around and recruit more moderates, but it’s also very late in the recruiting season right now, with filing deadlines passed in many states.Added another Blue Dog sympathizer: “The Democratic Party on all sides needs to realize that if they don’t hold moderates, they don’t hold these seats. … You have our people on the left, labor, and they pull stunts like this in Pennsylvania, the party will have a great time having meetings in the Rayburn Room outside the Speakers office for a long time.”
The problem is that the Blue Dogs haven’t been moderates. I think we can all understand, even if we don’t like it, that certain areas of the country are very culturally conservative. We don’t expect a Democrat from Tupelo, Mississippi to be with us on every issue. But on fiscal matters, on priorities like education and health and transportation and R&D and the safety net and regulation of Wall Street, we have every right to expect a Southern Democrat to be a Democrat. But the Blue Dogs are always and forever undermining us on those issues and taking the side of budget hawks, privatizers, and the Chamber of Commerce. The Blue Dogs aren’t moderates. With a few exceptions, they’re just warmed over Republicans. And as the Republicans move further and further to the right, the Blue Dogs drift with them.
We need to win back a lot of their districts. But we can do that with economic populists. And that is what we should do.
How about destroying the last unions? This shitty postal bill is a DEMOCRATIC bill, authored by Obama’s favorite Democrat, Joe Lieberman, and Tom Carper. Bernie Sanders’ much better bill lies on the floor somewhere in a committee room.
since you are a postal worker, please tell us what the bill does and why it sucks.
Good Part: Postpones closings and service standard cuts.
This was expected. It was well known that Congress wanted to kick the can past November. For us, it is a good part that Congress authorizes the use of FERS retirement money that USPS overpaid to be used for retirement buyouts, but I don’t expect the general public to care about that.
Bad Part: Continues the unfair and unique requirement to prefund 75 years of future retiree health care, albeit amortizing over 40 years instead 10. This provision, put in place by Bush and the Republican Congress in 1976 is the SOLE cause of the postal crisis. Without it, the USPS would be in the black. So the job cuts and service cuts will come. They just won’t come before the election. For us and our dependents, another bad part is that USPS will be severed from FEHB (Federal Employee Health Benefits). Expert testimony has been that this will hurt all federal employees by reducing the size of the insurance pool. IIRC, USPS makes up about half the pool. Instead USPS employees will get some new insurance plan expected to save $7B (that’s about $14K annually per employee). There are no details of this, but common sense says that you can’t cut premiums by $1200 a month and have any semblance of an effective insurance plan.
You can get an overview here: http://www.savethepostoffice.com/senate-does-postal-reform-overview-s1789
And the gory details here:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/s1789
And a rather Pollyanna view here:
http://www.apwu.org/news/webart/2012/12-046-1789passes-120425.htm
I say that because the Union President seems to think that Boehner, Cantor, and Issa will actually improve the bill.
Good points but just one quibble:
“taking the side of budget hawks”
I don’t see any budget hawks to speak of on the R side of the aisle. They want to reduce taxes sure, because that is what their innumerate, short sighted constituents want. And they want to reduce them mostly for the wealthy. But they have no interest in balancing the budget IMHO. I think the last 10 years have established that. So I think when we refer to these folks as “tax cutting panderers for the 1%” or something along those lines instead of “budget hawks”.
Exactly, Booman. There’s no good reason why “moderates” have to bend over backwards for insurance companies or whine about how business taxes are too high and regulation too strict. There are a lot of possible flavors of moderation, and that one is particularly sour. Someone like Bart Stupak or Mark Critz makes a LOT more sense than Jason Altmire or Mike Ross. There’s a substantial downside, of course, which is that a lot of economic populists are social conservatives on matters of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and the environment. Elect economic populists and you might end up with a Keystone Pipeline or parental notification for abortions in the process. But elect pro-business smiley faces like Altmire or Harold Ford and you might get those anyway, plus the demise of the social safety net and any attempt to tax wealth at the same rates we tax work.
I would totally agree with you, Boo, except that, as fate would have it, this New Yorker’s life turned out in such a way that I spend a good part of the year in Texas, in the congressional district formerly represented by Chet Edwards. I remember seeing Edwards described here and similar places as the worst Democrat in Congress, and that may be so. He was the only Texas Democratic congressman to survive that horrible redistricting of 2003:
(Wikipedia)
“As part of the 2003 Texas redistricting, Edwards’ district was renumbered as the 17th District and radically altered. The ethnically diverse cities of Temple and Killeen were removed. The Army post of Fort Hood was also removed. In their place, his district absorbed College Station, home to Texas A&M and a long-standing bastion of conservatism. It also absorbed several heavily Republican areas west of Fort Worth. While Edwards’ old district had been trending Republican for some time, the new district was, on paper, one of the most Republican districts in the country. Edwards defeated conservative State Representative Arlene Wohlgemuth in November 2004 by 9,260 votes, or approximately a 3.8% margin. Proving just how Republican this district was, Bush carried the 17th with a staggering 70 percent of the vote–the most of any Democratic-held district, and Bush’s 17th-best district in the entire country. Edwards was one of two Democrats to represent a significant portion of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, along with Eddie Bernice Johnson. In much of this district, Edwards was the only elected Democrat above the county level.” (snip)
Edwards survived until defeated by a Tea Party candidate in the slaughter of 2010.
The thing a lot of people remember about Edwards is that he voted against the Affordable Care Act. (Clearly he had to, and I’m sure Nancy Pelosi understood.) The thing I remember about Edwards is that, the week after the ACA became law, he conducted a telephone town hall with his constituents to answer questions, and made it very clear that if people had ANY questions they shouldn’t hesitate to call his office. The whole thing was very civilized and I had no doubt that he was wholeheartedly in support of the legislaation.
I don’t know if Edwards is a special case even for a Blue Dog, I’m just telling you how it felt on the ground to have a Dem congressman in these parts for so many years and how sorry we were to lose him.
While Chet Edwards voting record was certainly not a progressive dream, he wasn’t really on the radar of the purists for exactly the reasons you cite. And he certainly wasn’t going to drag a camera crew around to show how independent he was of Dem leadership, which was more or less Altmire’s schtick.
You nailed it. No one ever said Boo about Chet Edwards because he wasn’t a HolyJoe or Ben Nelson. As far as I know, he never backstabbed his party in public the way the two mentioned frauds did. I think it’s the biggest reason why people hate the Blue Dogs. Their public backstabbing.
I live in SD. We are going to see if it is possible to win SD-AL with a non-Blue Dog. We had, until 2010, Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin. She is a very nice person, granddaughter of a popular former governor. She is a Blue Dog, and refused to support ACA. I know many Democrats, and no one supported her stand on that. We were all sympathetic to her need to be in the middle, and not a liberal on a lot of issues. She did come close to not losing in 2010, and she lost for 2 reasons – she didn’t get out a big turnout in Sioux Falls, Brookings and the East River side (east end of the state) and Ron Coleman’s PAC ran a huge number of disgusting slimy ads against her in the last 3 weeks.
I wrote her an email at her law firm/lobbying firm and told her that she would not get a lot of support if she ran as a Blue Dog, but if she would if she ran as a Democrat. We now have 2 guys running. The favorite was an aide to Tim Johnson, senior senator. There’s a second guy, but he doesn’t have as much party support.
You’re also ignoring the other aspect of being a Blue Dog, Booman: they need money, and the rural areas they usually represent are poor. A lot of their funding comes from outside the district.
Note that the NYT lede on the PA races is “2 House Democrats Lose After Opposing Health Law“. And I thought you said “2 Progressives Prevail in Primaries”.
The problem with running economic populists in these former blue dog districts is that the people there believe in supply-side, let them eat cakenomics. When I lived in one of these districts I was so frustrated by the absolute devotion regardless of how the facts, data, and recent history contradicted the beliefs.
I’m glad to hear it. I think he’s a good man, and who knows, maybe he’ll be bakc.