Jon Ossoff, the Blue Dog problem and the need for Democrats to compete everywhere

Cenk Uygar of The Young Turks and Justice Democrats delivers a rant against establishment Democratic conservatism in the wake of the Jon Ossoff loss in Georgia's 6th Congressional district, Why Ossoff Lost and Democrats Can't Seem to Win! 06/21/2017:

Brian O'Shea of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports on the results in Karen Handel wins; latest Georgia 6th District runoff results 06/20/2017.

There are a couple of points that I hope don't get lost in the flood of commentary, interpretation and polemics over this special Congressional seat.

Lost in all of the noise is that Georgia is sending a real awful person to Congress.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 21, 2017

And a closely related observation:

Now that it's open season on Jon Ossoff, I thought I'd mention that he came within an ace of not having a runoff at all. That ain't nothing.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 21, 2017

David Sirota makes a polemical point in this tweet:

Democrats could run a robust national redistricting program on the amount they spent losing a single House race

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 21, 2017

But the upside of it is that the Democratic establishment was willing to spend significant amounts on a Congressional race in what had been considered a relatively safe Republican district. And a key part of the the 50 State Strategy when Howard Dean was DNC Chair involved trying to run Democratic candidates in every Congressional district, even in the "safest" Republican ones. There were several reasons for that: sometimes Democrats win in unlikely places; it's a way to build the Democratic Party organization; it gets the Democratic messaging and "branding" in front of more voters; and, at the very least, it forces Republicans to spend money to hold safe seats, funds that might otherwise go to other, more competitive races.

The Democratic Party is way too comfortable with losing, as a general matter. But not running candidates in Congressional races is a sign of laziness. In the sense that it takes time and, yes, losing some elections, to build the party nationally, in that way the Dems aren't comfortable enough with losing.

So, despite the richly deserved criticism being heaped on Ossoff's ConservaDem campaign by progressives, there is something encouraging in the experience of the Dems being willing to fight in the George-6 race. We can always hope that the experience of fighting Republicans will prove contagious for the Dems. But that's a bit like the cynical crack about second marriages, the triumph of hope over experience.

Also, from Charlie Pierce, who knows that people sometimes need to be reminded of the obvious (Do Not Ignore This Persistent Truth About Republicans Esquire Politics Blog 06/21/2017):

The biggest mistake the Ossoff campaign made was relying too heavily on the notion that there were Republican voters in that district that could be broken off from their party. This almost is never the case. Through decades of constant and unrelenting pressure, and through finagling with the franchise in a hundred ways in a thousand places, the Republicans have compressed the votes they need into an unmovable, diamond-hard core that will vote in robotic lockstep for whoever it is that wins a Republican primary. In American politics today, mindlessness is one of the strongest weapons you can have. Republicans vote for Republicans in Republican districts. Period.

Charlie seems to be having a why-can't-we-all-get-along moment when it comes to intra-Democratic Party strife: "Conclusion: I would like the 2016 Democratic primary elections to be over now."

One thing that this and the three other special Congressional elections this year bring to mind, also, is the obvious potential downside of the 50 State Strategy. Which is that contesting hard-for-Democrats-to-win Congressional seats also may gives the Democrats more elected Blue Dogs who think they need to hedge on Democratic commitments and values to stay competitive for re-election. Ossoff definitely sang from the Blue Dog hymnal: Greg Bluestein and Jim Galloway, Farewell to Jon Ossoff: Perhaps the last ‘cooperative’ Democrat Atlanta Journal-Constitution 06/21/2017.

New Deal Democratic activist and commentator Nina Turner addresses the Blue Dog problem here, Nina Turner on Why Ossoff Lost in Georgia Special Election The Real News 06/21/2017:

I learned a new phrase from the coverage of the Ossoff campaign, "Panera Bread strategy." It refers to the currently preferred coirporate Dem strategy applied by Ossoff to appeal to upscale "Romney Republicans" who are fine with Trump's policies but find the man himself a bit uncouth. D.D. Guttenplan takes on that approach specifically in Jon Ossoff’s Loss Should Be a Lesson to Corporate Democrats The Nation 06/21/2017.

On a related point, I would like to see a more innovative, less donor-aligned Democratic leader in the House than Nancy Pelosi. But Pelosi does have two strong favorable features from a progressive point of view. One is that she has been effective at the management job of a Party leader in Congress, i.e., keeping the Democratic Caucus reasonably together on important votes. The other is that she's a literal "San Francisco Democrat," which means she has a safe Democratic seat. The demands of being the Party leader means that she's adopted a less progressive profile that she previous had. But the Democrats' previous idea for selecting Congressional Party leaders was to select people from "purple" districts on the theory that it would give the Democrats a friendlier image to swing voters. But it also meant that that they were in greater danger of being unseated and therefore not in the best position to take strong public stands on some issues that are important to the Democratic base nationally.

So, if Pelosi steps down, the Democrats will need someone who's also not at all likely to go full Blue Dog on major issues.

Blue Dog Dems: what are they good for?

Digby has a good statement of the progressive Democratic position against the Blue Dogs in Using The Party As A Fire Hydrant Hullabaloo 11/03/2010

I think when you run against your own party in this age of polarization you are begging the electorate to vote for your opponent. We aren't in an age of ticket splitting and the parties are breaking pretty clearly along ideological lines (even if the Democrats haven't figured that out yet.) They do have the money chase in common, but the next few years are going to see a split there as well, with one party coming up with a convincing rationale for why they are a party of whores and the other one being forced by the structural nature of parliamentary politics to take the other side. (I'm not entirely convinced at this moment that it will break the way we might assume.) In any case, if you don't clearly identify with the party to which you ostensibly belong, people will figure there must be something shifty about you. When you see the two national parties in pitched battle all the time, you are right to wonder why in the world you should continue to support someone who can't --- even if they wanted to --- adequately represent your interests.

This new era is going to require more partisan cohesion to get anything done and to stop the things the Party doesn't want done. This seems like a good thing to me. Fewer Blue Dogs means fewer saboteurs within the party creating the illusion that there is a progressive governing majority. And that means that if the Republicans want to pass their destructive agenda, they will have to take sole responsibility for it instead of passing it under the rubric of bipartisanship --- or worse as Democratic policies --- and then blaming the Democrats when their policies don't work. Responsibility/accountability are much clearer when the parties are philosophically distinct. [my emphasis]

Tags: blue dog democrats, democratic party

Mystery of the Blue Dog Dem mystique

Cameron Joseph's report A Blue Dog Bloodbath? National Journal 10/29/2010 raises the major problem with the standard conventional wisdom about the Blue Dog Democrats. He reports:

The Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally moderate to conservative House Democrats from mostly rural areas, has grown in the last four years from 34 to 54 members. Those gains may soon be reversed. According to the Cook Political Report, 34 of them are in races rated as toss-ups or than lean Republican heading into next week’s elections. ...

Obama's average share of the vote in Blue Dog-held districts was 48.5 percent. Of the 54 Blue Dogs, 33 hail from districts that backed John McCain. While 3 in 5 Blue Dogs are at particular risk, just 1 in 5 in the rest of the Democratic coalition are as vulnerable. [my emphasis]

On what do the Blue Dogs tend to blame their predicament?

Blue Dog members past and present blame Democratic leaders and the difficult districts they hold for their likely losses.

"The Blue Dogs got to 54 because they won in marginal districts," said former Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, a Blue Dog co-founder. "When the majority got as large as it did, [party leaders] pushed the agenda in Congress further to the left, further than a person in a swing district could vote for and get reelected."

Retiring Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn., another Blue Dog co-founder, agreed. "The Democrats followed an agenda that was out of step with what people wanted," he said. "They wanted us concentrating on the economy, ending the war, and the debt, and the first thing out of the box was climate change. That started a disconnect between the Democratic Congress and the American people." [my emphasis]

If we unpack that a bit, the first thing that occurs to me is that Tanner complains that for the White House, "the first thing out of the box was climate change." What the [Cheney]? Yeah, I guess it was. Unless you count all the other stuff that took priority, like the stimulus package, health care reform, and escalating the war in Afghanistan. That sounds like some FOX News propaganda line.

And to me, it's just a bad joke when some conservative talks about how much people are worried about the national debt and deficits. Most people don't give a flying flip about either, as polls consistently confirm. Since both parties officially claim deficits are a bad thing, it's not surprising that general polls show people considering that a problem, but a very low-priority problem. In reality, Republicans ignore the debt altogether except when they're opposing a Democratic bill or trying to phase out Social Security and Medicare. When they are in power, giving big tax cuts to the wealthiest is their top domestic priority, the deficit be damned.

Dick Cheney voiced the actual Republican position when he said, "deficits don't matter." Sadly, about the only politicians and voters that actually seem to care about the deficit are Democrats. And this is a big problem. Not the deficit, the fact that Democrats worry about it.

The Blue Dog narrative is a firmly embedded piece of conventional wisdom: politics works on a horizontal scale from left to right. To win an election in American winner-take-all districts (which essentially force a two-party system to operate), a candidate has to win enough of "the middle" to get a majority. If they slide too much to the right or (especially!) to the left, they lose that sacred middle.

This belief is a key piece of the High Broderist faith.

Congressman Jim Matheson (D-Utah) offers another piece of conventional wisdom about the Blue Dogs:

Matheson says that despite electoral dynamics, the Blue Dogs think and vote the way much of America wants them to. "We've always been a bridge away from the polarizing dynamics of Congress," he said. "The Blue Dogs represent most of America in terms of being the more pragmatic people in terms of trying to get things done."

Tanner held out some hope that in a more closely divided Congress, whichever party is in power will have to work with moderates to get anything passed, even if there are fewer moderates than in the past. "If anybody is going to be successful with the gavel," he said, "they will have to forge some sort of consensus that will naturally include the handful of moderate Republicans left and the Blue Dogs." [my emphasis]

But wait. If the Blue Dogs "think and vote the way much of America wants them to", why are they in such trouble at the polls this year? If the voters on the average have become more conservative, shouldn't the Blue Dogs be getting some benefit from this? After all, they've been showing their independence from the Marxist Kenyan revolutionary President, haven't they?

This is part of the problem of the whole conventional wisdom on Blue Dogs. One answer to those questions is simply that they are in Congressional districts that were apportioned by the state legislatures in such a way that they have a close match between regular Democratic voters and regular Republican voters. Pretty much by definition, any election in those districts is likely to be competitive.

But given the figures cited above, it's hard to see how the Blue Dog Dems have benefited very much from their strategy of showing how often they oppose their own Party and distancing themselves from the Democratic President, even facilitating and contributing to the Republican criticisms against him. An example is the silly remark by Congressman John Tanner that in Obama's Administration "the first thing out of the box was climate change."

I'll suggest a different way to understand the position of the Blue Dogs. I'll ignore for the moment the commercial and business opportunities that can come from being a Blue Dog Democratic Member of Congress.

Linguist George Lakoff is right in a key part of his argument about Democratic messaging. Most voters don't vote primarily on the basis of analyzing individual policies in detail. They identify instead with parties and candidates based on how they perceive the candidates to line up with their values, whether or not the candidates and their actual parties genuinely represent those values. In Lakoff's description, there is no middle political position in the ideological way our Pod Pundits understand it. There are voters who line up consistently with Democratic values, other who line up consistently with Democratic values, and others who are "independents" in their voting because they have values that are enough in conflict that they don't have a longer-term tribal adherence to one Party or the other.

Those voters aren't going to be measuring the candidates on the basis of their rankings in the rating schemes of liberal and conservative groups. They are going to be swayed by candidates who convince them that he or she better represents their values. The two parties set the broad framework for what voters understand are the competing sets of values at play. If Blue Dog Democrats promote narratives that reinforce the Republican message against the Democrats, their only making the electoral hill they have to climb that much steeper. "I don't like the side I'm on" doesn't strike me as nearly as strong as message as, say, "My Republican opponent wants to keep sick children from going to the doctor!"

It seems to me that Democrats elected in highly competitive districts would be better advised to work to build the Democratic Party brand in their districts, and their own personal brands along with it. As Joseph says, "Obama's average share of the vote in Blue Dog-held districts was 48.5 percent. Of the 54 Blue Dogs, 33 hail from districts that backed John McCain." If I can still handle basic arithmetic, that means 22 of the Blue Dogs in question come from districts in which Obama won a majority in 2008. Those numbers suggest something pretty obvious: that even the Kenyan Marxist Muslim (by Limbaugh and Beck standards) at the head of the Democratic Party was competitive in most of those districts.

The Democratic Party nationally also has to worry about its own brand image. Obama paid far, far more deference to the Blue Dog obstructionists aligning themselves with Republicans than he did to House and Senate progressives these last two years. As a result, he restricted his own accomplishments significantly and left many of his base voters frustrated (the default condition for loyal Democrats in any case) and disappointed, even angry.

Yet the official Democratic Party campaign organizations give more attention and financial resources to these Blue Dogs who help to delegitimize their own Party than to progressive like Raúl Grijalva in Arizona who are hardliners in supporting the official Party agenda.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Tags: 2010 elections, blue dog democrats

Michael Lind goes on a Blue Dog Dem rant

Michael Lind has written some of the more perceptive things I've ever seen about the effects of segregationist traditions in the American South on present-day Republican Party politics.

So it's kind of sad seeing him fret so much over the fact that Democrats today are actually trying to find a voice to address the Republican town hall mob movement. And it's also sad to see him doing so in prose that sounds like "concern troll" talk, as he unfortunately does in Are liberals seceding from sanity? Salon 08/11/09.

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy.

In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in partisan Democratic mythmaking, have established that Goldwater and Reagan Republicans often were highly educated, socially secure individuals who happened not to share the values of liberal professors and journalists. This scholarship has been wasted, to judge by the glee with which the liberal blogosphere, in the aftermath of the ephemeral "Birther" flap, has dusted off the old conservatives-are-crazy meme, and revised it to suggest that all white Southerners are crazy.

Let's start here. Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006) may have been a Dem back in the day. But he was a pretty conservative political scientist, in a profession that in the US has tended to skew conservative. When he died in 2006, he was a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, one of the high temples of neoconservatism.

Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) was an historian who was best known for his writing on anti-intellectualism in American history and for an essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", which described and analyzed the influence of far-right ideology, conspiracy theories and counterfactual convictions on Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican candidacy for the Presidency, the seminal event of what is now known as "movement conservatism". That essay clearly talks about a political style. No reasonably honest reading of it could conclude that he was commenting about the mental health of those who voted for the Republican ticket in 1964.

Lind also employs a common but superficial trick here. Any sociological analysis of trends among the population can be cherry-picked to make it sound "elitist". After all, a sociological study involves somebody, usually some annoying intellectual, looking at data about some phenomenon affecting human populations and attempting to make some judgments about what might be causing it. Any such study can be stereotyped as some know-it-all assuming he or she knows better than everyone else what people are thinking and blah, blah. Also, sociological writing often requires the use of words with more than two syllables, which can also be taken as a sign of snobbish elitism.

Lind's article is surprising in the disappointing sense. It really is a stock recital of whiny-white-guy arguments for getting all huffy about any liberal saying anything touching on the subject of white racism. He rags on "liberal pundits" and the "liberal blogosphere" for trashing white Southerners as a group. His examples are exactly four: the two deceased professors already mentioned; Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum; and, (gulp) Kathleen Parker. Yes, that would be Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post Writers Group, who for years devoted her columns to providing respectable-white-lady versions of hardline Republican policies. Just within the last year or so, she's started to rebrand herself as a kinda-sorta moderate Democrat. And what he cites from Drum is a comment on a Parker column about what conservative Republican Ohio Sen. George Voinovich said about Southern Republicans.

Now, it's true that Beltway Village celebrity pundits are pretty much as flaky when they write about race as they are about everything else. That quality was on display last year around Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign and this year around the Gates incident. But if Lind wants us to worry that liberals in general and the Democratic Party are trashing white Southerners - he says Kevin Drum expresses "creepy bigotry" - he needs to make a case that such a thing is actually happening. In the end, his only evidence for such a trend is that a Mother Jones blogger made what at worst was a mildly clumsy attempt to talk about the role of racism among white Southern Republicans.

The article is so uncharacteristically light for Michael Lind that it makes me wonder if he isn't considering a rebranding of his own.

At the end of his piece, he makes what on the surface looks like a Blue Dog Democratic argument for downplaying "culture war" themes:

Here's how I see it. Liberals should respect and promote the interests of working Americans of all races and regions, including those who despise liberals. They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.

The majority of Southerners, white and black, including the black Southern diaspora in other regions of the country, are victims of the South's historic caste and class system, just as many Latino immigrants come from families and regions oppressed by Latin American oligarchies. Needless to say, Southern blacks suffered far more from slavery, segregation and the inequality that has persisted even after the abolition of the formal caste system. But Southern whites reduced to debt peonage after the Civil War, and the half of the white Southern electorate that effectively was disfranchised by the Southern elite in the South between the 1900s and the 1960s, were victims of the oligarchs as well. It is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been deprived of adequate education will be more likely than educated people to believe in nonsense like Birther conspiracy theories and AIDS conspiracy theories. And it is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been frozen out of politics by oligarchic elites will turn to flamboyant populist tribunes as their leaders, including theatrical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and Jerry Falwell.

The traditional liberal solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less power than those who lampoon them.

Compare that argument to his opening two paragraphs about the dead professors. If I were to characterize Lind's closing argument using the analysis-by-scorn method he uses in his article against his liberal strawmen, I would say that he shows shocking elitism. Why, those dumb Southern Republicans, he says, they're too stupid to recognize their own economic self-interest! They're just too dang unejicated to understand that geniuses like Michael Lind know what's best for them. And yadda, yadda, yadda.

More realistically, Lind's closing pitch is a ready-made argument for the Democrats to downplay issues like combating racial discrimination, gay rights and abortion. In the end, it comes down to the idea that the Dems should try to look and sound more like Republicans but have economic policies more favorable to working families.

But if we're talking about getting loyal white Republican voters to switch parties, in the South or elsewhere, the Democrats can't afford to ignore those touchy "culture war" issues. Because if some of those voters are actually voting against their own economic self-interest - as even the supposedly non-elitist Michael Lind thinks they are - then the Dems can't ignore that there are other than purely economic issues affecting their voting behavior. After all, the Republicans were successful at building a "Southern Strategy" based on exploiting those kinds of issues.

And if that successful Southern Strategy should really wind up leaving the Republicans as a Southern regional party, then Lind's Blue Dog strategy makes even less sense. Why should the Dems in a country that's demographically significantly different (i.e., a larger proportion of non-white minorities) try to copy a strategy that today threatens to prevent the Republicans from being a national Party at all?

Tags: blue dog democrats, democratic party, michael lind, racism

Joe Conason on "fiscal conservatives"

Joe Conason writes about the selective concern for fiscal probity of Blue Dog Democrats who are trying their best to gut health insurance reform in Blue Dog Math PolitickerNY 07/22/09:

Indeed, [Georgia Democratic Congressman Jim] Marshall [of Georgia] is typical of the Blue Dog mentality in his enthusiasm for useless military spending. He is an outspoken advocate of the missile defense program — perhaps the biggest waste of money ever undertaken by government, because it doesn’t work as advertised and almost certainly never will — at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars so far. As far as the Blue Dogs and their Republican allies are concerned, there is hardly ever such a thing as a wasteful military contract—and certainly never in their own districts. The United States now spends on defense roughly the total amount spent by all the other countries in the world combined, yet the fiscal conservatives rarely ever find programs worth cutting. We also spend more per capita on health care than most developed nations, yet our politicians cannot figure out how to make that huge expenditure pay for universal care, although every other wealthy nation does it.

So whenever someone describes the Blue Dogs as fiscally conservative because they oppose health care reform, remember how promiscuously they spend our money on projects that are far more wasteful and far less likely to benefit anyone, except the contractors who donate to their campaign coffers. Remember that self-righteous posturing over spending has very little to do with saving public money or serving the nation’s greatest needs. When politicians say they’re fiscally conservative, chances are they are anything but. [my emphasis]

Besides this matter of poor priorities, the Democrats really have to get over their hand-wringing over deficits. Republicans just use that to oppose constructive Democratic programs and then when a Republican President gets into office, they can't run up the deficit and the foreign borrowing fast enough by cutting taxes for the wealthiest and pumping more billions into boondoggles like the Star Wars program.

Tags: blue dog democrats, democratic party, democrats