Who Are the Blue Dogs? - The New York Review of Books

Who Are the Blue Dogs? - The New York Review of Books

[F]or the vast majority of members of Congress, once you've been elected and reelected once or twice, it takes either a pretty big scandal or a rare historical tidal wave (as in 1994) to produce defeat. Members know this—in fact, they typically know exactly how many percentage points a certain vote might cost them at the polls. One begins to suspect that some Blue Dogs don't really fear losing as much as they fear facing a semicredible opponent and actually having to campaign hard for a change.

That said, it is true that they "campaigned on fiscal responsibility," as the Pelosi spokesman put it after the stimulus vote. What Blue Dogs typically want out of legislative negotiations, one leadership aide told me, is to be able to go back to their districts and say to their voters that they managed to wrest this or that concession out of the more liberal leadership. This aide spoke of "thousands of hours of meetings" with individual legislators seeking to change health care legislation in large ways and small: "If you can't go back to your district and say, 'I've changed this bill to reflect you voters,'...you have to be able to point to something that you did that made the bill better."

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.