Let’s talk about what happened to the Blue Dog Democrats on election day. The Blue Dog Coalition had 54 members going into the midterms. They lost 28 members in those elections, including two out of four of the coalition’s leaders (Indiana’s Baron Hill and South Dakota’s Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin).
These devastating losses among the Blue Dogs are already being blamed on Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, Blue Dogs were begging Nancy Pelosi to go away before she announced her decision to remain in House leadership. And the left already has a convenient narrative in place to explain both the Blue Dog losses and the overall routing Democrats took at the poll.
According to the narrative, the Blue Dogs were particularly hard hit because they weren’t liberal enough. According tot his wishful thinking, if they’d been more liberal, indeed if all Democrats had simply gone farther to the left, the outcome of the elections would have been much different.
This, of course, isn’t true at all.
One of the most prominent Blue Dogs was also my Congressman, at-large North Dakota Rep. Earl Pomeroy, who lost re-election to a tenth term in Congress to Rick Berg by a rather stunning 10 point margin. Pomeroy is a microcosm for the Blue dogs as a whole, I think, and as someone who has followed his career closely for years I can tell you that Pomeroy’s problem didn’t lay with a paucity of liberalism but rather a disconnect between his behavior in Washington and his behavior back at home.
For years Earl Pomeroy has gotten away with a very liberal voting record (94% with Nancy Pelosi and 97% with his party) while using his membership in the Blue Dogs, along with a few votes on key issues where he split with his party, to convince voters that he was actually quite conservative. The problem is that during the course of Pomeroy’s career the new media came to be.
Where North Dakota’s media allowed Pomeroy to shape the coverage of his performance in Congress, the internet allowed his constituents to go around that coverage. They could read the actual bills that Pomeroy voted on. They could watch him speak on the House floor on CSPAN. They could read coverage of him produced by media outlets they’d have never had access to before. And, not to toot my own horn too loudly, they could read analysis from commentators such as myself.
This was extremely inconvient for Pomeroy as it exposed his charade. There was a spotlight shined on the disconnect between the words he spoke to his constituents and how he performed in Congress. Obamacare, and Pomeroy’s vote for it, may have been what got the voter’s attention but even without that catalyst I think Pomeroy was headed for the showers.
Indeed, I believe the public perception of this disconnect is a big reason why Pomeroy’s North Dakota colleague Senator Byron Dorgan retired without even trying to run for re-election.
But does all of this carry through for other Blue Dogs as well? It does, because the Blue Dog coalition was never anything more than a charade to cover up the liberal voting records of Demcorats from so-called “red states.” Back in August, Citizens Against Government Waste rated the votes of the Blue Dog Democrats and gave them an average rating of just 11%.
That’s hardly the rating of a group of politicians dedicated to being “independent voices for fiscal responsibility and accountability” as they describe themselves.
Again, I think the public at large became aware of this disconnect between the words of Blue Dogs and the actions of Blue Dogs, and they voted accordingly. The Obamacare vote just brought that disconnect into sharper focus.
