Below is a letter signed by fourteen members of Congress asking Barney Frank to delay action on a bill cracking down deceptive practices by banks that issuse credit cards. The organizer of this letter is Kansas Democrat Dennis Moore, who has also been the leader against reforming Bankruptcy laws, and you'll recognize most of the others as Blue Dogs: Tim Mahoney, Charlie Wilson, Don Cazayoux, and Ed Perlmutter. And then there are the 'moderate' Republicans like Mike Castle and Chris Shays, as well as a few wingnuts. One of the signers, though, Greg Meeks in New York, is in one of the safest Democratic districts in the country, NY-06, with a +38 Democratic PVI. And unlike the others, he's going to face consequences for his actions.
Meeks is a corporate Democrat similar to Al Wynn and Ed Towns, and he is seriously out of step with his district. He is so beholden to his contributors that after he shepherded through the Bankruptcy Bill in 2005, he and his allies said to the New York Times that they felt positively giddy. Despite his aggressive defense of the credit card and financial services industry, his district is ground zero for the foreclosure crisis and the predatory lending crisis. Meeks has an overall score of D+ on the CBC Monitor Report card, and he voted with the Republicans on FISA to give wiretapping authority to the President and immunize the telecom companies.
Meeks is now facing a primary challenger, a candidate named Ruben Wills, the executive chief of staff to state Sen. Shirley Huntley. Meeks is vulnerable because he pushed Clinton hard and pledged to deliver the district to her; he failed, with Obama taking it by several thousand votes. And now Wills is taking advantage of that failure to try to challenge him using Huntley's prestige in the area. I don't know Wills, and all I've found is this video and some news reports about his challenge and the dissatisfaction of the local machine with Meeks. I'm going to make some calls into New York.
Obama is really shaking up the black establishment. Meeks, Towns, Kilpatrick, Wynn, and Lewis have all gotten primary challenges. But it seems in black communities all over the country that support for Obama is shorthand for more aggressive community driven leadership. A whole lot of CBC members were clearly out of touch with their districts. That said, this is not ideological; the same dynamic has not happened among Blue Dogs, with no primary challenges among liberal whites and/or conservative whites emerging to take on the encrusted residue of the Dixiecrats in suburban or rural areas. Both places became pools of anti-Clinton/pro-Obama voters that he used to win the primary, despite highly divergent economic and political interests.
It seems like the Obama coalition has been able to cover over ideological and regional differences and become the symbol of progressive and community-driven leadership in the black community while in conservative areas remaining a symbol of anti-liberal 'new' politics opposed to partisanship. It'll be interesting to see how these tensions come to a head in the Obama administration, as the white Blue Dog leaders and the progressive community activists in these multi-racial areas do not agree on much except that they didn't like Clinton.
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