End Of The Road For Blue Dog John Barrow?

Blue Dog Heath Shuler is going into lobbying & John Barrow is likely to join him after November

Ironically, working class blacks saved the miserable career of reactionary Blue Dog John Barrow when most of his conservadem colleagues were being wiped out in the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse of 2010. In 2008 (while Obama was winning his district with 54%) Barrow won reelection with a healthy 66%-- 164,562- 84,773. Two years later, Barrow, after voting consistently with the Republican Party on most crucial issues-- his ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote score is a dismal 39.09... and that's sunk down to a mere 25.89 for the current session-- won 57-43%, 92,459- 70,938. As you can see, that was a lot of Democratic voters from 2008 who stayed away from the polls in 2010. That was the pattern that ended the careers of over half the Blue Dogs. But, like I said, African-American voters did come to the rescue of Barrow.

This year, many of those African-American voters can't help Barrow. The Republican-controlled legislature-- which has been after Barrow for his whole career-- has gerrymandered the district and left a lot of black areas in Savannah out of GA-12 and replaced hem with very white Augusta suburbs. The new boundaries wouldn't have seen an Obama 54% win; it would have seen a McCain 56% win.

Barrow is a Blue Dog co-chairman (for policy) and a member of the corrupt conservative New Dems as well. He's one of the most dependable Democrats Boehner and Cantor can depend on to help them present their radical and extremist agenda as "bipartisan." This week, for example, he was one of the 16 corporately-owned Democrats to join the GOP in trying to wreck the EPA. But he's against progressive solutions across the board.

Blue Dogs and yellow dogs will turn out for Barrow this year... but that's about it. And there aren't enough of them in the new district to save his scrawny neck. And the GOP isn't taking any chances. The NRCC has reserved $900,000 in the Augusta and Savannah media markets to use against Barrow starting in late September. That's a fortune in that district. And the bonus for the GOP is that "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel has put Barrow in the DCCC's Frontline program for endangered incumbents and will be sucked into wasting between a million and two million dollars on a pointless, unwinnable race. Israel will waste an unconscionable amount of money to try to save Barrow-- who has virtually no chance to win-- starving several campaigns that could be won, but won't because of Israel's ideologically-driven decision-making. Notice that the DCCC ActBlue page shows that between 3 grassroots donors who have made the decision to contribute to Barrow's campaign, they have raised him $8, the smallest amount of any Frontline candidate.