Bye-bye Blue Dogs

One of the headlines coming out of each of the last three elections has been the impending extinction of the Blue Dog caucus in the House of Representatives. Last week’s trouncing sounded the death knell of the last Blue Dog left in the wild of the Deep South, John Barrow of Georgia, and that fact has got a lot of political pros running around in circles lamenting the loss of that Democratic species and trying to figure out how to reintroduce them back into their habitat. What they don’t realize is that the Blue Dog was a horrible Frankenstein experiment gone wrong and it’s far better for the political environment if they just pass quietly into extinction before they permanently damage the eco-system.

Blue Dogs weren’t just a southern phenomenon, although their leadership was certainly centered there and the concept behind them was consciously derived from the old Southern Dem saying “I’d even vote for a yellow dog if it was a Democrat.” There was more to it than that, though. As Ed Kilgore pointed out in this piece, the Yellow Dog Democrats were simply Southerners who saw the Democratic Party as “the default vehicle for day-to-day political life, and the dominant presence, regardless of ideology, for state and local politics.” In that sense it was similar to the machine politics in the urban centers. This was how you got business done, got favors, wielded influence in your community. Ideology existed but there wasn’t anything particularly consistent about it.