This Is The House

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- by Doug Kahn

I want help breaking up the Blue Dog caucus in the House. I mean reduce, split, expose, weaken, distract, unelect. We don't get the legislation we want, the country we want, if this doesn't get done in the next 12 months. 

I know; hot air, right? 75,000 copies of hot air [This is the House that Rahm Built,] is going out today inside the Washington City Paper. The corporate flacks attending the AHIP [America's Health Insurance Plans] conference and all the usual suspects in Washington will see it, and I promise to do what I can over the next year to back it up. I hope you tell people why I put it out there. The 2010 mid-term elections have to be, have to be, recognized as a repudiation of the spineless wing of the Democratic Party. This is our opportunity to prove that we are for real, that we're not just pajama slackers wedged between sofa cushions. We need to run at these people head first, so they always have the thought in their minds, "What do Democrats in my district want me to do, how does society need to work better, for people who need help? What does the Progressive Caucus want, and what are they going to do? What are these Blue America people going to do?"
 
The Blue Dogs think they're a political party, not a caucus. Go prove it to yourself: try reading the bombastic press releases on the Blue Dog website. They really think they're something special, the brainy 'bi-partisan moderates' in Congress. They're full of self-importance and self-congratulation, and they're full of shit. It's a group with several main elements: southern Cracker Democrats (really Republicans), real moderates who at this point would ditch the group if they had an excuse, and a large faction who joined up because they want political cover for their lack of principle and/or backbone.
 
Your typical Blue Dog constantly talks about representing his/her district, never about leading it. This is an excuse for ignoring the Democrats who elected them, and catering to Republicans and Independents instead. Any political consultant worth hiring will tell you this: the average voter will vote for someone they mildly dislike over someone they don't know. A Blue Dog incumbent can ring up adequate numbers from Republican voters just by voting no on any truly progressive issue.
 
And they're being enabled by three ex-officio leaders of the pack:

1) Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who gets his kicks by sand-bagging the Speaker of the House. He wants to be Speaker, never will be, and he needs to get over it.

2) DCCC chair Chris van Hollen, who appointed Blue Dog Patrick Murphy to run the Red to Blue program this cycle. The Chair's job this year will be recruiting new Blue Dogs and protecting incumbent Blue Dogs. He got his job by pleasing Hoyer and promising to obey number...

3) Rahm Emanuel.
 
The phony Blue Dog principle of 'fiscal discipline' covers their votes against real Democratic principles; votes against health care reform, the stimulus bill, the energy bill, bankruptcy cramdown. Their so-called fiscal discipline doesn't extend so far as to prevent them from voting for the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which will cost $3.9 trillion over the next 10 years. They vote mindlessly for supplemental appropriations supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq has cost $694 billion so far, and that doesn't count the human cost. 

In states which will gain seats in the 2011 reapportionment, like Arizona, there'll be new districts where progressive Democrats can win. Having Blue Dog Harry Mitchell as a legacy will make it more difficult for Nancy Pelosi and the House Progressive caucus to craft legislation that actually solves problems, problems which have grown over decades of foot-dragging. I don't really care whether Harry gets a progressive primary opponent. In the general, Harry's got to go. I'm going to make sure Democratic voters in his district know enough about him to make an informed decision. 

Over the past month I've read every article about Congressional elections published by the New York Times from mid-1933 up to the November election in 1934, when Democrats gained 9 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate, a mid-term surprise. We won in Republican bastions like Maine, with candidates who were decidedly liberal, whose opposition was incumbents who fiercely opposed FDR and the progressive economic policies of the New Deal. Our worst defeat was in Louisiana, where populist Huey Long's Share Our Wealth platform won the elections.  

And the newspapers and conventional wisdom had it all wrong. The fiercely right-wing and anti-Roosevelt rhetoric filled the newspapers but lost the election. The opposition, it turned out, was a marginalized faction of shrill doomsayers. Read this, from Republican National Committee Chair Henry Fletcher: "We must stop the definite movement toward State socialism which has for its purpose if not indeed the ownership, at least the rigid governmental control and operation of agriculture, business and industry." Does this remind you of what's going on right now? The voters ignored them. 

Everyone reading this memo has been part of a historic development in American politics. As the Supreme Court has whittled away at the weak campaign finance laws we're still enforcing, campaign money has become more and more important. But as you've proved over the past two years, progressives can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in small contributions for candidates and incumbents who are willing to speak out in favor of progressive principles. [Even mediocre ballot-slot fillers can raise a million just by not being Planetary Commander Michelle Bachmann or Joe Wilson, Mr. Truthiness.]
 
The upshot of your ability to raise money online has encouraged members like Alan Grayson to speak forcefully on behalf of our agenda. Can anyone deny that just one member of the House has changed the whole tenor of the health care debate? Don't think for a minute that your support goes unnoticed by incumbents; when we say that they're influenced by campaign contributions, we have to have confidence in our own thinking. These people are constantly campaigning, with an election every two years, and the campaigns become more and more expensive. Having you as a backstop takes the pressure off people like Raul Grijalva, frees him to work on organizing the progressive caucus. I never got closer than 50-43%, but being the Democratic candidate three times in CA-27 taught me how time-consuming and mentally debilitating the many hundreds of hours of dialing for dollars can be.
 
Real Democrats in House campaigns have never needed financial parity with Republican candidates. They need adequate funding to communicate; when they've had it, they win against Republicans who have far superior funding. It's one of the assumptions of the DCCC and of political professionals who run Democratic House campaigns. You're not wondering why, are you? "Never overestimate the intelligence of the American people" [Mencken] is b.s.: when adequately informed, voters elect candidates who endorse Democratic principles.
 
It's the phony Democrats who need huge warchests, because they're trying to make enthusiastic voters out of Democrats while saying the following: "Let me be clear. I do not endorse this idea, as it was just one of many ideas we, as legislators, have brought up and discussed in the numerous, ongoing negotiations and discussions we have had on healthcare reform over the past several months." That's Blue Dog Mike Ross trying to squirm out of a previous statement that made it sound as though he might be in favor of opening up Medicare to everyone.
 
Bad Dogs like Harry Mitchell put out mind-numbing tripe like the following: "I agree with Sen. John McCain when he says that we cannot afford to do nothing. I believe we should fix what is broken about health insurance and retain what works and we should begin with the areas where both Democrats and Republicans agree." 

We all of us believe that Progressive politics makes sense for the country, and we have to trust the voters to recognize the same. Given enough information, and a demonstration of competence by the Democratic candidate (which a well-funded program with multiple voter contacts proves), people discern the difference between common sense and corporate hucksterism, and they vote their hearts instead of their selfish interests. If it were not so, we'd still be living in monarchies. Progress comes from the abiding desire of a vast majority of people for a more equitable and caring society. 

There's a good chance that the 2010 elections will be different from any we've seen in our lifetimes. Conventional wisdom that I've always relied on may not hold true this year. The availability of adequate campaign resources (not just money but the numerous progressive organizations which now provide the nuts and bolts of competent campaigns), will bring out numbers of progressive candidates, more than we ever imagined. Anyone who has talked to me about elections knows I'm skeptical of efforts to 'recruit' progressive candidates. People who need to be coaxed to run for Congress don't usually have the drive to do the amount of work a campaign entails.  I'm on the way to being convinced that we won't have beat the bushes for willing candidates. We just have to be ready to support them in primaries against the usual suspects, the political hacks who end up joining the Blue Dogs.