IN A BIT of political news seemingly engineered to briefly activate the otherwise deadened pleasure receptors of people old enough to remember the Obama administration, the Blue Dog Democrats are in disarray. There are, for one thing, fewer of them than ever. Though their numbers generally decline after any Democratic midterm loss, because some of them represent “swing” districts and also because no one really likes them, this decline in membership, The Politico reports, is also the result of numerous representatives leaving or declining to join the coalition of self-proclaimed moderates.
The House Blue Dog coalition now consists of seven members (down from more than 50 during the Obama era), all men, after seven other members departed following “a heated disagreement over a potential name change for the moderate bloc.” The proponents of the change, which included the coalition’s last two women members, were lined up behind the name “Common Sense Coalition.” These members, Politico says, felt the “Blue Dog” name “had a negative connotation that kept their colleagues from joining.” The remaining Blue Dogs, it turns out, felt that no change was necessary, and indeed now claim they don’t want to have too many members anyway. “The Blue Dogs have never prioritized having a large coalition,” Blue Dogs executive director Andy LaVigne said in a statement.
And so Congress’ self-styled pragmatists, who proudly value compromise over ideological purity, have managed to lose a low-stakes negotiation with… themselves.
The heart of the disagreement is over what “Blue Dogs” evokes in potential new members. The Common Sense Coalition felt the term too closely associated with a particularly Southern brand of social conservatism, though many of the remaining Blue Dogs, like the repellent Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, are Northerners to the bone. But the “Southernness” of Blue D; ogs is a complex subject, as it represents both the style of politics they still wish to practice, and also a specific history they largely disclaim.
Histories of the “Blue Dog” moniker typically describe it as an intentional echo of the term “yellow dog Democrat,” which referred to undiscriminating party loyalists—more specifically, in the post–Civil War, pre–Civil Rights era, it was applied to Southern voters who’d support a “yellow dog,” provided he ran as a Democrat. That association doesn’t seem quite right for a group known as much for party disloyalty as fervent partisanship. And in actual fact, the direct antecedent of the “Blue Dogs” was a group of Democratic lawmakers, known for crossing party lines to support the agenda of President Reagan, who styled themselves the “boll weevils.” Some of the original Blue Dogs of the 1990s were, like Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, former boll weevils.
Stenholm, specifically, was credited by William Safire as the first Reagan-era Democrat to adopt the boll weevil moniker. But he didn’t coin it. That honor goes to Jim Crow-era segregationist Democrat Howard W. Smith, who wished to make it clear that the bloc of civil rights opponents he represented were unkillable pests from the South.
Given that history, one understands why Clinton-era conservative Democrats sought a more race- (and region-) neutral term. And it was, by any measure, a successful rebrand; histories of the Blue Dogs hardly ever mention their boll weevil roots. If the Blue Dogs were more attentive to their own history, the group might not have been so set on rejecting an effort to escape its past with another fresh new brand. Alas, its members were unwilling to put aside their differences in order to Get Stuff Done.
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