Vulnerable Pups

by digby

I just watched yet another one of those stories about the poor Blue Dogs who simply have to vote against health care because the upstanding Real Americans in their district just won’t stand for all these liberal elites socializin’ our excellent health care system. This CNN piece with John King was filmed in bucolic Idaho where the surrounding countryside is breathtakingly gorgeous and the food looks amazing. It is the perfect picture of Real Murika. As required by law, much of it was filmed in a breakfast diner and featured tables full of salt ‘o the earth middle aged white people saying adorable things like, “I voted for Reagan even though he was too liberal.” The rare Democrat defending the congressman takes a position of quiet subservience, agreeing that those liberals in San Francisco and New York don’t know diddly about diddly.

Certainly, these places really are incredibly beautiful and the people who live there are as American as apple pie. But so is San Francisco and the residents who live there are as American as Cioppinno. The idea that these folks in the diner are some sort of perfect representation of the average American is a fantasy cooked up about 80 years ago by the immigrants who created the movie myth of middle America. Whether of not John King meant it that way or not, by framing his story the way he did, he perpetuated this narrow view of the average All American small town man and woman.

Even worse, the idea that the Blue Dogs are in particular danger of losing their seats is not necessarily correct. Michael Tomasky looked into it recently:

So what I’m trying to get at here is: how vulnerable, really, are some of these Blue Dogs? To hear them talk sometimes, you’d think if they depart one iota from a basically conservative agenda, the voters will toss them out. I’m not insensitive to that prospect. As we will see, some Blue Dogs have very legitimate concerns. And obviously, one who represents a mostly rural district can’t establish a pattern of voting like Maxine Waters. Everybody gets this.

But a lot of them play that violin way too often, confident that big-city reporters in Washington and New York will just accept that their district is full of reactionaries and that they have to pander to that reaction constantly to stay in office. So I went to the numbers to try to gauge how vulnerable they really are.

As you may have guessed he determined that, for the most part, they aren’t very vulnerable at all:

You’ll notice, if you’re familiar with the current debates and with some of these people, the interesting fact that some of the more vocal Blue Dogs are among those with the most comfortable margins. As I noted in a post the other day, Mike Ross of Arkansas is a leading healthcare Blue Dog. His MVM is a gaudy +67. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who helped weaken the cap and trade bill, has an MVM of +41.

You will also notice if you really study this list that McCain won many of these districts rather narrowly. In fact, he won 24 of them by 10 points or fewer. This hardly makes these districts scarlet red.

You can see also how many of these members either run unopposed or face only token opposition in these red districts. Many of them are long-time incumbents and fixtures. Even some with only modestly positive MVM figures are solid incumbents, as you can tell by looking at their margins: Gene Taylor (number 24 on the list, +50), Ike Skelton (number 31, +32), Dan Boren (number 32, +40).

My conclusion? Yes, some Democrats have to be very careful and not be seen as casting a liberal vote. But they’re a comparatively small number. A very clear majority of these people have won by large enough margins that it sure seems to me they could survive one controversial vote if they some backbone into it.

But many of these folks manage to sell this story line to Washington reporters who’ve never been to these exurban and rural districts and can be made to believe the worst caricatures. I say many of these Democrats are safer than they contend. People need to start challenging them on this.

I agree. But it probably wouldn’t change anything because these people actually are conservatives who believe in the things they are doing. Their “vulnerability” is simply the excuse they use to collect money and power within the Democratic Party. In fact, they are Trojan horses, operating inside the Big Tent to carry out conservative goals no matter which party is in charge. And the party leadership surely knows this and allows it to continue for reasons of their own.

The media, on the other hand, keeps up the mythmaking because it’s a fun story that allows them to continue the lazy pretense that the world is constructed like a TV sit-com. And that’s probably an even bigger problem than the Blue Dogs being Blue Dogs.

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