By Paul Kane,
The Blue Dogs are searching for their voice, trying to find the same pitch behind their once forceful bark.
Four years ago, they were the most influential voting bloc on Capitol Hill, more than 50 House Democrats pulling their liberal colleagues to a more centrist, fiscally conservative vision on everything from health care to Wall Street reforms.
Now, the Blue Dog Coalition is a shell of its former self, shrunken to just 15 members because of political defeat, retirements after redrawn districts left them in enemy territory and just plain exhaustion from the constant battle to stay in office. Several are not running for reelection in November, and a few others are top targets by Republicans.
In danger of losing even more clout, the leading Blue Dogs are regrouping and rebuilding. They are adding four members to their ranks this week — Reps. Ron Barber (Ariz.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Nick J. Rahall II (W.Va.) — and angling to play a key role in bipartisan talks over the next few years in the belief that the polar tension in the Capitol will thaw.
“We’re in this for the long haul,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (Ore.), co-chairman of the Blue Dogs, said in an interview, predicting the Democrats could only regain the majority if they are once again competitive in those rural and Southern districts. “We’re the way the Democrats are going to get back into the majority.”
There’s a super PAC, Center Forward, that is dedicated to supporting the group’s members in elections, proving effective in 2012 races that also saw a rare elevation of one of their own to the Senate, Joe Donnelly (Ind.).
The group wants to see its power grow and believes that the tea party influence on House Republicans will begin to wane, leaving many rank-and-file GOP lawmakers searching for across-the-aisle allies to restore the legislative process. “Maybe because of the heightened partisanship in this Congress, you’re seeing more and more members interested in working across the aisle,” Schrader said.
But Republicans aren’t easing up on the Blue Dogs. The four new members come from swing districts that are being targeted by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Just seven Democrats are left in districts that were won by 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and six of those are held by Blue Dogs.
Early last year, the NRCC created a task force built around winning those districts through very locally focused campaigns, rather than just trying to paint the politicians as clones of President Obama or House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.).
The Republicans believe this helped in pushing two longtime Blue Dogs, Reps. Jim Matheson (Utah) and Mike McIntyre (N.C.), into retirement, and they are waiting to see whether others on the “red zone” target list will retire.
“This is an end of an era, moderate Democrats are no longer welcome in President Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s party. Without McIntyre and Matheson and moderate candidates like them, Democrats have no path to the majority,” said Andrea Bozek, spokeswoman for the NRCC.
In some ways, the coalition is almost back to its founding days in 1995.
After Republicans made historic gains in 1994, routing old Southern strongholds that had tilted to the right, a small group of remaining Democrats from rural districts created the Blue Dogs around the principle of fiscal restraint. Slowly but surely, their ranks grew. By 2006, then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) scoured the countryside looking for future Blue Dogs to recruit, leading to a midterm election that vaulted the Democrats and Pelosi into power.
Back then, Blue Dogs kept interested Democrats out of their coalition. Their internal rules forbid them from becoming more than 20 percent of the full Democratic caucus, because they do not want to water down their centrist views.
In 2009 and 2010, Pelosi spent countless hours negotiating with senior Blue Dogs over the scope of the Affordable Care Act. The group played a key role in eliminating what liberals had considered a key piece of the bill, a public health insurance option, to assure the overall bill’s passage.
The 2010 midterms took a particularly painful toll on the coalition, with 28 members either losing or retiring, leaving just 25 Blue Dogs at the start of 2011. Those ranks were further diminished in the 2012 elections by a redistricting process that was firmly in Republican control in states such as North Carolina.
John Tanner, a former representative from west Tennessee who co-founded the coalition in 1995, says he is working with normally Republican-leaning interests on Washington’s K Street to deliver a message that they need to support these centrist Democrats because their GOP opponents tilt toward tea party interests that have not been friendly to the business community.
“It’s an opportunity to reach out to a whole new crowd downtown,” Schrader said of the fundraising potential for the four new Blue Dogs.
Now a lobbyist, Tanner said that he wants to help the Blue Dogs at least grow enough in number so that they have a bloc of votes that can exploit House Speaker John A. Boehner’s problems with his right flank among the Republicans that are most loyal to the tea party. That way, if Boehner (Ohio) loses 25 Republicans on a bill, there are enough Blue Dogs to step in and lend him support if the legislation is tilted more in their direction.
“The Blue Dogs could play a critical role if they could get a critical mass,” Tanner said.
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