comments_image -

Blue Dogs: The Democrats Who Love Big Business

A bloc of 49 influential Dems thinks government's biggest problem is that it provides too much for its citizens.
 
 
LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
Join our mailing list:

Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.

 
 
 
 

The House of Representatives is a body that produces few stars, but Jim Cooper of Tennessee is a household name inside the Beltway. David Brooks has called him "one of the most thoughtful, cordial and well-prepared members of the House." He is viewed by the well-funded budget-hawk constituency as one of its most articulate advocates. Among his colleagues he has a reputation as a wonk and an intellectual -- he even teaches a class at Vanderbilt University on health policy -- and as the philosopher for the caucus of forty-nine conservative House Democrats known as the Blue Dogs. He gives off the slightly martyred air of someone who believes himself to be smarter than the people he works with.

In the past few weeks Cooper has emerged as the dissident-in-chief among House Democrats (a role he's been rehearsing since 1994, when his refusal to pull his "compromise" healthcare proposal helped kill the Clinton plan). Cooper was one of eleven Democrats -- ten of them Blue Dogs -- to vote against Obama's stimulus package. A few days after the vote, Cooper caused a stir when he suggested to a local radio station that Obama's aides had encouraged him to vote against their bill, a statement he had to walk back the next day.

When I spoke to Cooper the week after the vote, he defended it as counterintuitively pro-Obama, cast against "certain Congressional old habits and bad practices. A lot of our colleagues have not gotten the change message." He expressed frustration with the speed of the process, as well as the fact that the leadership had forgone the normal committee mark-ups, saying that members were "just told how to vote."

If that was the case, I asked Cooper, why had he voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program little more than a week after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sent a three-page proposal up to the Hill asking for $700 billion? "We were told," he said, "and I believed at the time, that the TARP money was a genuine national emergency."

When you walk into Cooper's office, you are greeted by a large sign that reads:

The Blue Dog Coalition

Today the U.S. National Debt Is $50,000,000,000,000

Your Share of the National Debt: $170,000

The Blue Dogs were founded in 1995 in the wake of the GOP takeover of the House, but they didn't get much attention until the Democrats took it back in 2006. If you read any of the post-election coverage, it was the freshmen Blue Dogs like Pennsylvania's Chris Carney and North Carolina's Heath Shuler who had upset high-profile Republicans who were the MVPs of the cycle and the party's new voice. Leaders of the House Pack? the Philadelphia Inquirer asked in a headline, Blue Dogs Could Point Way for Democrats.

Their star turn extended through much of the 110th Congress, as caucus members flexed their muscles on their signature issue: fiscal discipline. They pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to adopt "pay-go" rules, which required all new expenditures (except, notably, those for the war) to be offset by tax increases or corresponding spending cuts. Their outsize influence frustrated progressive activists who viewed their support for the Iraq occupation and expanded government surveillance powers and their opposition to "net neutrality" as obstacles to fulfilling the progressive promise of the new Congress. The website Open Left labeled the group "Bush Dogs" and began documenting the ways they enabled right-wing legislation.

"Remember, you don't get to choose your politics," Cooper told me when I visited his office one morning in December. "The voters choose you. All Blue Dogs and our predecessors were trying to do is reach people who don't read The Nation.... Why have people been begging to be Blue Dogs? Because it's a brand of Democrats people in the heartland can trust. It partly means fiscal conservatism and it partly means we're not going to rubber-stamp the rest of the [party] agenda."

submit to reddit

-
Email
Print
Share
LIKED THIS ARTICLE? JOIN OUR EMAIL LIST
Stay up to date with the latest AlterNet headlines via email
See more stories tagged with: blue dog democrats, conservative dems
Advertisement
Most Read
Most Emailed
Most Discussed
On REDDIT
On DIGG
 
loading most read content ..
Advertisement
Record 45% of Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Have Filed for Disability

By Muriel Kane | Raw Story

 
 
President Obama's Memorial Day Address: "Honoring Those Who Made the Ultimate Sacrifice"

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | AlterNet

 
 
"Tubes": What the Internet is Made Of

By Laura Miller | Salon

 
 
Students at Stuyvesant Take Issue With Sexist Dress Code

By Jill F | Feministe

 
 
Chris Hayes on Memorial Day: Glamorizing and Justifying War with the Term "Hero"

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | AlterNet

 
 
Cory Booker vs. Philly Mayor Michael Nutter on Mitt Romney

By BooMan | Booman Tribune

 
 
How Florida Governor Rick Scott Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney

By Judd Legum | ThinkProgress

 
 
Renowned Economist Simon Johnson Calls for a National Safety Board for Finance Ticking Time Bomb

By Lynn Parramore | AlterNet

 
 
Veterans' Gap

By Ed Kilgore | Washington Monthly

 
 
"Hero of War"–Rise Against Song Captures Iraq War Veteran’s Tragic Experience

By Amy Goodman | Democracy Now

 
 
 
 
 
loading ...
POWERED BY DIGG'S USERS
 
[ page served from web 2 ]