Matt Yglesias

Blue Dogs Rolled at “Fiscal Responsibility” Summit

Yesterday’s fiscal responsibility summit turned out to be pretty boring. And that all-encompassing dullness tended, I think, to obscure the real story coming out of the summit—the way Barack Obama basically rolled the Blue Dogs. I’ve been resistant to “secret plan” theories of Obama administration activities, but now that we can look at this sequence of events in retrospect, the plan looks to have been pretty solid. Faced with Blue Dog pressure over the stimulus, the White House agreed to bend-not-break and make a big deal about how the deficit is terrible and we need a summit about fiscal responsibility. Then he unveiled a plan to contain the medium-term deficit that consists of tax hikes on the wealthy and fewer wars. Good ideas! But not ideas that involve liberals giving any actual ground. Similarly, he’s moved decisively to execute liberals’ long-time hope of redefining the “entitlement problem” as primarily a problem that requires systematic health care reform.

None of this, obviously, forces Blue Dogs to support the Obama agenda. But it does more or less smoke them out. The caucus has managed to obtain a reputation for “fiscal discipline” over the past few years without doing anything to observe it. Moderate Democrats have been much more likely than liberals to support the two main drivers of debt over the past eight years—tax cuts and the war in Iraq—but a lot of hot air and sporadic opposition to small-bore items like alternative energy funding have sufficed to get that reputation. Obama has managed to not so much seize the mantle of fiscal responsibility as simply dramatize the longstanding point that there’s been nothing especially deficit hawkish about Blue Doggery nor anything especially budget busting about the basic progressive agenda.

All told, it’s a small-scale political masterstroke. Obama’s progressive agenda remains what it’s always been, but now it’s fiscally responsible! Not that I thought it is or was ever irresponsible. But it lacked the “fiscally responsible” label, and now he’s got it without giving anything up.

Evan Bayh Organizing Senate Version of “Blue Dog” Caucus

This seems like a good idea to me. With Republicans out of power, the GOP can’t really block progressive change in exchange for large sums of special interest money. That creates an important market niche for Democrats willing to do the work. It was a good racket for the House Blue Dogs in 2007-2008 and there’s no reason it couldn’t work for Senate analogues over the next couple of years.

Gender Gaps

Tom Schaller hangs out with some Blue Dogs and observes that women are underrepresented in their caucus relative to their numbers among House Democrats as a whole:

I asked Democratic pollster and women’s vote expert Celinda Lake about this as we strolled along downtown Denver’s 16th Street pedestrian walkway. “I think that women voters and women Democrats believe in a proper role for government, and the corporate stuff is a bit of a turnoff,” said Lake. “Even the women in the coalition have the most progressive voting records for Blue Dogs, by far.”

I think the interplay between identity and ideology doesn’t always get the play it deserves. Most people, even those with sound views, aren’t very good at being politicians. And the vast majority of people with progressive political views aren’t white men, while the vast majority of white men don’t have progressive political views. Thus, insofar as one draws one’s candidates from a disproportionately white male pool, it’s going to be very difficult to actually come up with an adequate number of talented politicians with sound political views. What’s more, in the case of women there’s actually no evidence that women are at a disadvantage when running for election. Rather, they’re underrepresented because they’re discriminated against in the recruitment process which would be an easy thing to change. And if it was changed, the pool of potential candidates would be both much larger and more progressive — vastly increasingly the odds of politically talented progressives coming to the fore and going on to higher office or leadership positions.