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Yesterday, in "Blue dogs decimated, blue dogs triumphant" I called attention to the Blue Dogs losing more than half their seats in Congress, and in "Fighting smart", I endorsed Big Tent Democrat's argument that progressives should start immediately "focus on Dem primaries for House seats."
To flesh out the argument further, yesterday at DKos, Chris compared the Blue Dogs, New Dems & Progressive Caucus, showing how drastically different they fared:
And the resulting swing in makeup of the House, making the Progressive Caucus the new plurality:
Check his post out for a chart with a much finer level of detail. But here's how Chris concluded:
Losing the House is painful, and will cause lots of problems for two years (or more). However, it does give us an opportunity to reshape the ideological composition of the House Democratic caucus in a positive way. Imagine if we can retake the House with the CPC maintaining this new plurality.
Clearly, the strategy Big Tent Democrat suggests would help us do precisely that. In 2006 and 2008, progressive activists were the boots on the ground that helped build a new congressional majority for Democrats. But it was a majority hand-picked, for the most part, by Rob Emmanuel, and it produced exactly what you'd expect given this parentage--a great deal of waffling and ambivalence, with a House Progressive Caucus that seldom even tried to assert itself. I really don't think most people appreciate what a tremendous accomplishment it was for Nancy Pelosi to get so many bills passed, so many of which were relatively good--as can be readily deduced by seeing how many hundred of them died without going anywhere in the Senate.
But what if those members elected with our hard work had all (or at lest mostly) been progressives instead? True, the Senate would have still been a tremendous obstacle. But with a more ideologically unified House caucus, we could have had even stronger legislation, held more unified hearings and engaged in other activities to highlight the content of bills and generate enthusiasm and voter support to bring pressure to bear to help move things through the Senate. It's not a magic bullet, to be sure. But it's clearly the biggest tool that's readily available for progressives to reach out and grab. And the way forward to fill those seats with progressives hasn't been this wide open since just after the 1994 elections, when there was nothing remotely close to the level of activist organization that we've got today.
Finally, this is the most effective way I can see to organize a counter-force to Obama's tendency to further compromise with Republicans. Being old enough to remember Ted Kennedy's primary challenge to Carter in 1980, I know there is simply no comparable liberal figure for progressive activists to rally around. Equally important, everyone in the party knows that as well. But an organized effort to recruit dozens of progressive House candidates is something else again. It's far more credible, given what we've already accomplished in the past. And it carries with it an implicit threat of splitting the party if Obama goes to far in compromising with implacable enemies. (The theory here is simple: A credible implicit threat is more credible and meaningful than a non-credible explicit threat.)
How can we not take advantage of this opportunity?
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