Now that Obama has taken the sting out of the big racial standoff of the summer by inviting the parties to the White House
for a beer, we can’t help wondering why the same personal touch hasn’t worked on the Blue Dogs.
Who are these supposed Democrats who seem not only immune to the charm offensive but determined to derail the Obama express?
In case you haven’t already gone to Wikipedia yourself, the
Blue Dogs are descendants of the
Yellow Dog Democrats (Southerners still punishing the GOP for the behavior of Abraham Lincoln—ie, they would "vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican"). The Yellow Dogs said they had been “choked blue” by what they considered extreme behavior of their leftist colleagues in the party. (And yeah, they’re also linked to the “Blue Dog” paintings of Louisiana artist George Rodrigue. Two of the founders were Louisiana lawmakers who had Rodrigue on their office walls, before both seceded and became Republicans. Now that
we’re all reading Infinite Jest, it’s hard not to think in footnotes.)
Anyway, said Blue Dogs, who annoy the hell out of other Democrats by
getting themselves called “moderate,” cleverly suggesting that other Democrats are crazies, have slowed the train down so much that everyone’s worried sick that all the old opponents who colluded in killing health care reform last time around will clamber on board.
The Blue Dogs say health care reform is too expensive, but they’re making Democrats pull out their hair by opposing everything the Dems have proposed to make it affordable: taxing the top 1% of earners, deploying a public plan to compete with private insurers, requiring businesses to either offer insurance or kick in to the government plan.
Last week the Blue Dogs nearly
came to blows with Henry Waxman, before someone stepped in to separate them. Unfortunately, Waxman isn’t the kind of guy you’d really want to have a beer with, so all they agreed to was a cooling off period, which is pretty much what they wanted in the first place—a delay.
Waxman aside, where do they get the nerve to stiff-arm the president on his No. 1 priority? Depending on who you believe, it’s either because Americans have actually
turned against the health care reform they seemed so passionate about when they went to the polls to vote for him 8 months ago, or because they’re really
in league with special interests on health care.
A lot of the 50-some Blue Dogs were elected in what had been Republican districts, where they say the Obama effect is beginning to wear off, and they don’t want to be left stranded when voters “come home” to the GOP.
Paul Krugman can't resist noting grimly that one of the original Blue Dogs—one of the two who turned Republican—helped push through Bush’s Medicare bill, which was a huge giveaway to drug and insurance companies, then got himself on the very lucrative payroll of PhRMS, big pharma’s lobbying arm.
The
Journal can't resist noting gleefully that the Democrats have
only themselves to blame for this predicament, after they actively recruited “moderate’ candidates (Republicans in Democratic clothing?) to run in conservative districts. The strategy worked brilliantly—until it came to getting something important passed.
So Americans may in fact be relieved not to have to spend August reading about health care reform—reading about Democratic infighting in Congress is almost as depressing as reading about the recession—but it's even more depressing to contemplate a collapse of health care reform come fall. Nancy Pelosi assured the nation on TV yesterday that she’s 100% certain the bill—a bill,
some bill—will pass. But nobody is afraid enough of Pelosi
to posit that her birth certificate must be a fake, and nobody has every accused her of being charming. It's time for Obama to throw a helluva cocktail party.
