Harold Meyerson, writing in the WaPo, has a great piece today that accentuates a drumbeat we've been beating here at OpenLeft. A few weeks ago, Chris wrote in response to Blue Dogs winning a "victory" in taking down a jobs bill:
This is only a victory if self-immolation is considered a victory. Consider:
1. Blue Dogs slash aid to states;
2. In response, states will engage in massive layoffs of public sector workers;
3. These layoffs will exacerbate an already dismal employment picture;
4. Voters will likely turn against Democrats as a result;
5. More Democrats in vulnerable seats will lose re-election;
6. Blue Dogs are disproportionately from vulnerable seats.
So yes, truly a big victory for the blue Dogs. They managed to reduce their own chances of re-election. Awesome!
And last week, I described the behavior of several conservative Senators as ascribing to the Underpants Gnomes theory with respect to jobs, deficit, and electoral strategy:
Apparently various Senators have the same theory on jobs:
1. More unemployment
2. ?
3. The deficit is reduced!
Not to mention:
4. Get re-elected by my still-unemployed constituents who are happy I prioritize the deficit over their economic well-being! Woo!
Meyerson nails it:
Earlier this year the Blue Dogs, and many other Democrats, were saying they would welcome an end to the debate over health-care reform so they could turn their attention to jobs, jobs, jobs. But now that President Obama and Democratic legislative leaders have done that, the Blue Dogs have largely turned skittish.
Efforts by the leaders in both houses to pass bills that would save the jobs of teachers and police officers, maintain states' ability to make Medicaid payments and extend unemployment insurance have hit not only the expected bumps in the road (unified Republican opposition) but also fresh potholes: Blue Dog resistance to countercyclical spending.
[...]
Until recently, virtually every Democratic member of Congress could be counted on to support some level of countercyclical spending. That was one of the basic ways Democrats distinguished themselves from the laissez-faire right. But today, the Blue Dogs insist on offsetting stimulus with cuts, which can create a self-negating position. Suppose you vote for a stimulus that enables the states to save teachers' jobs, while offsetting that expenditure at the federal level by reducing spending on, and jobs in, building rail lines. In aggregate economic terms, you may well have zeroed out the net effect of your action. It's hard to believe that anyone ran for office to craft such exquisitely balanced nullities.
The problem here is that the Blue Dogs, like much of the public, conflate the issues of the nation's long-term fiscal sustainability with the short-term deficits created by the worst downturn since the '30s. Thus the Democratic imperative of creating jobs in 2009 became, earlier this year, one of creating jobs and reducing the deficit, and now, for some Blue Dogs, has become chiefly one of reducing the deficit. In polls, meanwhile, the public rates "jobs" as its chief concern, with the deficit lagging far behind. But because this recession is deeper and longer than any since the '30s; because the job-creating component of the first stimulus, while considerable, was clearly too small; and because the administration did not concentrate those jobs in visible agencies, as Franklin Roosevelt did in the Works Progress Administration, only a minority of Americans credit the stimulus with saving or creating jobs. For millions of Americans, concern over the deficit is at least partly a concern over the government's broader inability, as yet, to "fix" the economy. Reducing the deficit now, however, will make the economy worse.
Yet the Blue Dogs' short-term deficit hawkery is more than bad economics. It's bad politics, too. Even pragmatic centrists -- especially pragmatic centrists -- have to be in favor of something. The Blue Dogs don't seem to know what exactly that might be.
What interests me most about this is that there are two routes to defeating Blue Dogs- one is, as Chris described this morning, through increased progressive base performance in primaries. The other is, as I suspect will be the case for many Blue Dogs this cycle, going down at the hands of a Republican. As is the custom in electoral world, lots of political groups, pundits, strategists, etc. do "why what happened on Election Day happened" post-election op-eds and strategy memos. There is an opportunity here to link unemployment and electoral performance, along with potential exit polling demonstrating that among those who voted against the Blue Dog, the #1 reason was jobs, in making a case that Blue Dogs spelled their own electoral defeat here. In fact, that would be pretty useful and timely right now.
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