Blue Dogs Wiped Out But... And A Path To Victory For "Third Way"

Yesterday the polls had barely opened when a contingent of the conservative Democrats whose careers are bought and paid for by Big Business was already shrieking about how they should be in charge now, despite the drubbing conservative Democrats were taking at the polls. The Democratic Party losses, underwritten by the same corporate interests that underwrite Third Way, the DLC, the New Dems and the Blue Dogs, are seen as "a golden opportunity for Third Way, a five-year-old think tank that remains largely unknown outside the Beltway."

The group has spent months preparing to capitalize on this moment and take a more central role in the party.

And it’s coming down squarely on the side of centrism-- and planning to vigorously challenge the left. [Let me interrupt for one moment to explain that at Politico the word "centrism" means "hard right but not quite fascist."]

“The party is about to come to a major fork in the road,” said Jonathan Cowan, Third Way’s president. “A left turn at this juncture is a turn toward permanent minority status.”

The group’s efforts reflect the underlying tension President Barack Obama faces as he heads into the last two years of his first term. Liberals say there’s an enthusiasm gap with Republicans because Democrats are disappointed that the party was too timid about the size of the stimulus, compromised on the public option in health care reform and ran away from its accomplishments. Those closer to the middle say a more moderate face for the party is the only hope to win back independents, reelect Obama and retake the House in 2012, assuming it is lost Tuesday.

Cowan’s group wants to play a role in 2011 akin to the Democratic Leadership Council’s in 1995. Then, the last time Democrats lost the House, President Bill Clinton’s willingness to “triangulate” between traditional Democratic orthodoxies and the Republicans who controlled Congress led to welfare reform, community policing and a slew of smaller accomplishments that helped propel Clinton to a second term.

Third Way, with a staff of 35 and a $7 million budget for next year, has filled a vacuum left by the DLC’s loss of influence in the wake of founder Al From’s 2009 departure.

...[T]he group’s fellows and policy advisers will start rolling out memos and studies that offer a framework for how Democrats could reach common ground with Republicans. The economic team is developing a proposal that it thinks could win bipartisan support. It includes tort reform and incentives for research and development. And Cowan’s writing a paper with a colleague about “the danger of left-wing economic populism.”

With cap and trade effectively dead in a Republican House, Third Way will release a “Plan B” for energy reform. On Dec. 7, it’s hosting a summit on nuclear energy-- one of the group’s big causes-- with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Obama energy czar Carol Browner.

It will come out with a paper on the need for changes that could save Social Security, which it presents as a direct challenge to economist Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist who has said Obama didn’t go far enough with the stimulus and other programs.

And the group will advocate for education reform that focuses on middle-class, not low-income, schools. Third Way is also pushing for more trade agreements and a new approach to immigration.

The biggest challenge facing the ambitious group: It’s not completely clear there will be an appetite from the left or the right for what it has to offer.

Republicans will probably be unwilling to cooperate on most of the group’s issues. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said in a recent interview that he sees his most important job as getting a Republican elected president in 2012. Would-be Speaker John Boehner must manage tea partiers who want bold moves, not compromise.

Third Way quickly built up its influence by working with moderate [meaning, in Beltway talk, extreme right-wing] congressional Democrats. Two other cofounders, Jim Kessler and Matt Bennett, became close with several freshman and sophomore Democrats by offering messaging advice on everything from health care to national security at regular briefings organized by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Also before the polls closed-- perhaps before they even opened-- Paul Krugman pointed out why the Democrats did so poorly: "it’s mainly the economy, stupid... Major Democratic losses were guaranteed by the failure to deliver a significant improvement in job markets. To have avoided these losses, Obama would have had to have a stronger economic program-- above all, a bigger stimulus." And, surrounded by Wall Street shills Geithner, Emanuel and Summers, he never tried to get a bigger stimulus.

[S]ince the fall of 2009 the White House has systematically adopted Republican positioning on the budget; remember how the State of the Union included a freeze in domestic spending?

Policy on other fronts seemed almost designed to cede populist sentiments to the right: not even a hint of tough positioning against Wall Street, totally limp policy toward China, and more.

On the organizational side, it’s still mind-boggling how the White House deliberately shut down the whole network of grass-roots organizing that helped put Obama there in the first place. All that idealism, all that energy-- and they were told to go away and let Rahm Emanuel do his deals in peace.

So again: it was mainly the economy, with the effects of a bad economy reinforced by Obama’s consistent policy of undercutting both messages and movements that might have helped Democrats weather the economic storm.

Conservative Democrats who lost their seats last night-- with their 2009-10 Progressive Punch scores. As you can see, almost all of them voted more frequently with the Republicans than with the Democrats, helping to wreck the party's brand in the minds of voters.

Suzanne Kosmas (FL)- 50.41
Tom Perriello (VA)- 46.34
Glenn Nye (Blue Dog-VA)- 30.08
Allen Boyd (Blue Dog-FL)- 53.72
Baron Hill (Blue Dog-IN)- 43.44
Rick Boucher (VA)- 48.72
Chet Edwards (TX)- 53.28
Lincoln Davis (Blue Dog-TN)- 41.32
Kathy Dahlkemper (Blue Dog-PA)- 47.97
Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS)- 22.95
Chris Carney (Blue Dog-PA)- 40.52
John Adler (NJ)- 38.52
Jim Marshall (Blue Dog-GA)- 32.52
Zack Space (Blue Dog-OH)- 34.71
John Boccieri (OH)- 44.72
Charlie Wilson (Blue Dog-OH)- 59.32
Patrick Murphy (Blue Dog-PA)- 63.33
Frank Kratovil (Blue Dog-MD)- 34.96
Bill Foster (IL)- 42.28
Betsy Markey (Blue Dog-CO)- 50.41
Steve Driehaus (OH)- 50.41
Debbie Halvorson (IL)- 52.03
Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS)- 22.50
Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL)- 19.83
Ike Skelton (MO)- 50.00
Harry Teague (NM)- 39.83
Earl Pomeroy (Blue Dog-ND)- 58.54
Mike Arcuri (Blue Dog-NY)- 44.26
Scott Murphy (NY)- 40.54
Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ)- 40.16
Harry Mitchell (Blue Dog-AZ)- 28.46
Michael McMahon (NY)- 49.18
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (Blue Dog-SD)- 39.84
John Salazar (Blue Dog-CO)- 57.72
Walt Minnick (Blue Dog-ID)- 27.64
Melissa Bean (IL)- 47.97
Dina Titus (NV)- 56.91

Oh, so that "path to victory" I was suggesting for the Third Way... they can join the GOP and let us have one corporate party representing the Big Business special interests and one party representing working families. It was certainly clear last night, at least to me-- if not to the Insider pundits who depend on the corporate media for their livelihoods-- that the voters reject a Democratic Party mired in the same corruption and corporate muck that afflicts the GOP. The Blue Dogs were just devastated and the most reactionary ones, the ones who voted with Big Business and the Republicans most frequently (Bobby Bright, Gene Taylor, Travis Childers) were the first to go down.