Two Bush Dogs Flipped On SCHIP, Three More to Go

Posted by Jane Hamsher at 6:10 AM on October 16, 2007.

This post, written by Jane Hamsher, originally appeared on FireDogLake

On the heels of our recorded call to the districts of five reactionary Democrats who refused to support the override of George Bush's veto of SCHIP, two of them have now flipped their votes -- last week Baron Hill, and today Mike McIntyre of North Carolina.

This is going to put incredible pressure on Bobby Ethridge, his fellow North Carolinian, to flip as well.

Bill Scher and Conn Caroll discuss our campaign on Blogginheads TV in a segment on "the new majority whips:"

Bill Scher: What's happening in the liberal blogophere now at least in these corners is not so much about winning for winning sake, having Democrats in charge whoever they are, there are actual policies that they would like to see implemented and they don't think it's helpful to the overall Democratic party to have a handful of people undercutting the party at key moments....I think the key for that to be as successful as possible is if it's just seen as a handful of blogs trying to extract demands from a handful of people that's probably not going to work as well long term. If they're successful elevating these votes into the spotlight to the point where their own constituents are aggrieved by what they're doing and they see that there's pressure in their own districts to act differently and to be a stronger voice for the party that's going to have the most impact. We see it had a little bit of an effect with Baron Hill this week and we'll see if it continues on before the vote on Thursday.

Conn Carroll: Yeah the Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that one of the other Bush Dogs targeted here, Jim Marshall of Georgia, already has two people who are going to be challenging him in the Democratic primary.

That's exactly what we're trying to do -- motivate people in these districts to be aware of what's going on, get involved and take action. (When we were talking about doing this in the first place, Matt Stoller said "these guys don't care about people in their districts, all they care about their buddies they go hunting with. We might as well be robocalling Washington, D.C.")

Our ad against Jim Marshall in Georgia runs tomorrow in his hometown paper. We've raised $6100 of the $10,000 we need to pay for it. You can help out by contributing to the Blue America PAC here.

Tagged as: bush, children, health care, democratic congress, s-chip, conservative democrats

Jane Hamsher is the founder of FireDogLake. Her work has also appeared on the Huffington Post, Alternet and The American Prospect.