Blue Dog (Or "Ex"-Blue Dog) Steve Israel's War Against Progressives Ramps Up

This week the DCCC was bragging how they are continuing "on offense since Congressman Paul Ryan was named to lead the Republican ticket, launching new automated phone calls to expose 50 vulnerable Republicans for backing Ryan’s budget that ends Medicare." Here's a sample call:

Hi. This is Julie calling from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to alert you to a new development about Medicare.

Your Congressman, [insert Republican freak's name], voted for a budget that would end Medicare and now the budget’s architect, Paul Ryan, is the Republican candidate for Vice President.

A nonpartisan analysis showed that Ryan’s budget would raise health care costs for seniors by $6,400. The Tax Policy Center also said the Ryan budget would give people making over $1 million a year an average tax break of $265,000. And Congressman [insert Republican freak's name] supported all of it. 

That’s just wrong.

Call Congressman [insert Republican freak's name] at (xxx) xxx-xxxx and tell him to stop protecting millionaires at the expense of Medicare and the middle class.

And they did a variation on the theme for GOP challengers who didn't get to vote for the Ryan budget but have in some way embraced it. Sounds kosher, right? Look a little deeper. The first hint that something's not kosher is that the DCCC ran these robo calls in Wisconsin 7 and 8 but not in Wisconsin's first CD, the southeast Wisconsin district Paul Ryan himself represents. Alarm bells started ringing. Here was the hand of Steve Israel again-- undermining Rob Zerban's already tough race against Ryan by sending a signal to whoever takes signals from the DCCC that they're just not interested in defeating Ryan. This is a message that the DCCC has been sending for Ryan's entire career. Obama won the district in 2008 and Rob is in a much better position to win than either of the DCCC candidates in WI-07 and WI-08.

So then I went through all 50 seats they're running the calls in. And it was the same everywhere across the country. In state after state, with just a very few exceptions, they've left off progressives and put their money behind reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems, including rightwingers and anti-Choice fanatics who would be sure to vote with the GOP. Take Michigan for example. They're running the calls in MI-01 against Dan Benishek and in MI-03 against Justin Amash, respectively for Blue Dog Gary McDowell and anti-Choice freak Steve Pestka. But they left off MI-11, an open seat that Obama won that would be FAR easier to win than either of these other Michigan seats. Why would they do that. Dr. Syed Taj just won the primary there and he's a progressive, exactly what Steve Israel is trying to prevent from getting into the caucus. Here are a list of winnable seats with progressive candidates where the DCCC should be running ads like this-- and would be if it was serious about taking back Congress:

CA-25: Lee Rogers vs Buck McKeon
CA-39: Jay Chen vs Ed Royce
FL-09: Alan Grayson vs Todd Long
FL-26: Joe Garcia vs David Rivera
MI-08: Lance Enderle vs Mike Rogers
MI-11: Syed Taj vs random crazy teabagger
NC-10: Patsy Keever vs Patrick McHenry
NY-23: Nate Shinagawa vs Tom Reed
OH-15: Pat Lang vs Steve Stivers
PA-03- Miss Eaton vs Mike Kelly
PA-16: Aryanna Strader vs Joe Pitts
TX-18: Beto O'Rourke vs Barbara Carrasco
VA-07: Wayne Powell vs Eric Cantor
WI-01: Rob Zerban vs Paul Ryan
WV-1: Sue Thorn vs David McKinley

The DCCC needs to take back 25 seats to win back Congress. Here are 15. Steve Israel flushing money down the toilet in pursuit of absolutely unwinnable seats for his corrupt Blue Dog cronies like Hayden Rogers (NC-11) isn't going to do anyone any good at all-- especially while he throws away 15 seats just because the Democratic candidates are actual Democrats, not his kind of corrupt corporate whore. If you'd like, you can help most of these candidates on this ActBlue page.