If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a catastrophic midterm election night, it was their assumption that now, at least, the party’s leaders would have to focus on recapturing the political center. If nothing else, they reasoned, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be forced to step aside as party leader, yielding control to Steny H. Hoyer, the Maryland congressman who had been the Blue Dogs’ ally in party leadership.
A week later, that hope appears to have been woefully misguided. Ms. Pelosi defied expectation by announcing that she wanted to stay on, forcing Mr. Hoyer into a potential fight to hold onto the No. 2 spot in the party leadership. And a lot of liberals seem to have decided that the moderates were not the victims of the Democratic downfall — but rather its primary cause.
For the House Blue Dogs — Democrats who are more conservative than their party on fiscal policy and sometimes find themselves out of step with their more liberal colleagues on social issues — last week’s election was like a political Gettysburg, the carnage unfolding all around them. A caucus that comprised 54 Democrats was instantly reduced by half. The top two leaders of the Blue Dog caucus, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota and Baron P. Hill of Indiana, were among those defeated.
A lot of Democrats took it for granted that these defeats marked a repudiation of the speaker and of the party’s liberal agenda. “This election was an old-fashioned whooping,” says Jim Matheson, the Utah Democrat who is next in line to head the Blue Dog Coalition. “You’ve got to shake up your leadership when that happens.”
That is not, however, how Ms. Pelosi’s liberal supporters see it. Even before the votes were cast, a counterargument was already taking hold — that it was the centrist Democrats, and not the liberals in Congress, who had imperiled the party’s majority.
“Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus,” Ari Berman, a writer for The Nation, argued in a New York Times Op-Ed in October. In an e-mail after the election, Jim Dean, who now runs the liberal group Democracy for America, founded by his brother Howard, told supporters that the progressive candidates who lost had been victimized by “corporate Democrats who refused to stand up and fight for real change.”
The theory here, embraced by a lot of the most prominent liberal bloggers and activists, is that centrist Democrats doomed the party when they blocked liberals in Congress from making good on President Obama’s promise of bold change. Specifically, they refused to adopt a more populist stance toward business and opposed greater stimulus spending and a government-run health care plan. As a result, the thinking goes, frustrated voters rejected the party for its timidity.
There are a few strange things about this argument, even beyond the contention that American voters — 41 percent of whom described themselves as “conservative” this year, compared with 32 percent in 2006 — somehow deem Congress to be insufficiently liberal.
For one thing, many of these same liberal activists were saying something very different in 2006, when Rahm Emanuel, who was then overseeing House campaigns for the party, recruited a slate of less ideological candidates to compete in more conservative districts. Some leading bloggers then — who are now proponents of the Blame the Blue Dogs theory — proclaimed themselves to be against ideological litmus tests, arguing that the most important thing was to choose candidates who could actually win.
This was the same moment when Howard Dean, the unofficial leader of the progressive movement, was telling anyone who would listen that the Southern guy with a Confederate flag in his truck, as Mr. Dean invariably described him, should be a Democratic voter, too. The whole point of Mr. Dean’s “50-state strategy” as party chairman was to find candidates who could win everywhere.
Apparently it was easier for liberal activists to countenance ideological diversity when they were out of power. Now that the party has had to make the requisite compromises in order to pass major legislation, such a “big tent” vision of governing no longer seems so appealing.
Second, while House Republicans have now managed to cobble together a majority that is more or less ideologically cohesive, history would suggest that the same feat isn’t so easy for Democrats, who have actually never succeeded in pulling it off. Even during the great heyday of Democratic government in the 20th century, when the party enacted Social Security and Medicare and civil rights legislation, its dominance was possible only because Democrats had shaped a majority coalition made up of Northern liberals and Southern conservatives.
Similarly, it’s hard to imagine how Democrats in this last Congress could have assembled a majority and passed the president’s agenda — including what is arguably the most consequential social legislation since the Great Society — without having fielded victorious candidates in a lot of conservative districts in 2006 and 2008. In a memo just before the election, titled “Why Liberals Need Heath Shuler,” Jon Cowan and Anne Kim of the centrist group Third Way summed it up this way: “Call them ‘fake Democrats,’ but they delivered a real majority.”
In the end, perhaps this is why Ms. Pelosi won’t be so quick to marginalize the remaining Blue Dogs if she retains her role as leader — no matter what her liberal supporters would prefer. The departing speaker, as everyone knows, can count votes. And for Ms. Pelosi, now 70, to write off the conservative districts where Democrats just lost could well mean writing off her chance of becoming speaker again.
