More blue dogs bite the dust:
But organized labor invested heavily in taking down Altmire, in part for his vote against the health-care law, and former President Bill Clinton endorsed Critz. (Critz is no liberal either; he also opposed health-care reform, although he wasn’t in office at the time and voted against repealing the law.)
While Altmire won the majority of voters in his territory, turnout in Cambria County was huge and almost entirely in Critz’s favor.
“Congratulations to my colleague Congressman Mark Critz on his hard-fought and well-deserved victory in the primary,” Altmire said in a statement. “He has my full support as his campaign moves on to the fall.”
A Blue Dog Democrat and another health-reform opponent, Holden represented a central Pennsylvania swing district for the past ten years. But Republican-controlled redistricting gave him a safe Democratic district where he was little known to the vast majority of voters.
That created an opening for Cartwright, a Scranton lawyer who stars ina popular legal segment on the evening news.
While Critz may not be much better, watching Altmire go down is particularly satisfying, since he was one of Stupak’s stooges during HCR and he is one of the jackasses who tried to stick the shiv in Nancy SMASH!:
The first anti-Pelosi vote during the alphabetical roll call came from Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.). He rose to answer the call of his name and declared loudly and clearly “Heath Shuler!”
So let’s see- Stupak, Shuler, and Altmire are all out of politics now, and Nancy Pelosi is still in charge of her caucus. It’s too bad you can’t teach blue dogs new tricks, or there might be an object lesson in there somewhere.
taylormattd
Awesome.
Vlad
I voted against Altmire yesterday. It felt pretty good.
So long, asshole!
ruemara
I was quite happy to read that this morn. Now… if we can do this to some tea party housemembers, retain our senate hold…I could be a happy camper come December 2012.
David Fud
Better Democrats. Nice.
FlipYrWhig
Critz is a blue-collar, pro-labor, pro-military social conservative, as I recall. That’s what Democratic economic populism looks like in a lot of places.
schrodinger's cat
Another one bites the dust..
Xecky Gilchrist
It’s looking like Utah Blue Dog Jim Matheson may be in trouble too, owing to redistricting. Not much joy there, though, since in his case he’ll probably be replaced by some extreme-fringe-right teatard.
Keith
Heath Shuler for Speaker of the House?! I would have had more respect for the guy if he voted for himself. (probably even if he voted for an inanimate carbon rod….Shuler is a joke of a choice)
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Xecky Gilchrist:
Fixed to clean up redundancy.
Mike E
Let this be a lesson: always boost yer blew dawg street cred by defying the Democratic Party platform. This will work out for the best.
c u n d gulag
I always call them “Red Dogs,” ’cause there ain’t nothin’ blue ’bout ’em.
Good riddance.
Now, f*ck off!
schrodinger's cat
Guess who is clutching their invisible pearls en route to the fainting couch?
MattF
This is what’s needed if Democrats are ever going to resemble an organized political party. And it’s good to see Bill Clinton out there publicly on the side of the angels– and, presumably, driving wingers nuts with his own special sauce.
4tehlulz
How is someone who opposes health-care reform on the side of angels? This guy’s just gonna fuck us on a vote to repeal (god forbid that happens).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, I actually think Stupak is a loss. I think the GOP took his district (?) and if he was a fetus-fetishist crotch-sniffing ass-hat who by his own admission let himself be played by the Bishops, he was pretty good on labor and economic issues. But he was so desperate for a pat on the head from the totally non-fabulous pontiff who designed his own red leather shoes and matching hat to be made for him by Prada that he fucked up the expansion of a hundred year quest. Altmire always struck me as a colossal ass. All to get a redundant affirmation of the fucking Hyde Amendment
@MattF:
I’m not convinced HRC is running in ’16, but Big Dog is working the Pennsylvania hustings, she wants to keep her options open.
amk
Isn’t the flip-side of losing blue dawgs, a rabid teatard or a munchin style asshole ?
Lev
The Blue Dogs are dying because nobody wants what they’re selling. If you ever read their manifesto (easily found thru Google!), you quickly discover that there are exactly four points, two of which are entirely vague and banal, and the other two are basically, “Let’s not burden job creators with new regulations,” and, “We hate entitlements!”
What’s the audience for this? I know why they were in office–Rahm Emanuel built up their numbers deliberately because he didn’t want liberal Democrats with the whip hand in 2007. But where are they now? Maybe that guy wasn’t all that smart after all.
Dave Anderson
There is a bit more on why the unions and Democratic Party leadership supported Critz over Altmire than just HCR/PPACA/Heath Shuler. Altmire played out of the Manchin playbook and was out for himself and a positive mention on Fox News. Critz’s voting record is not that much better from my perspective but he knew how to be a team player and not shamelessly self-promote in negative sum situations.
The Dems know that they are losing one Dem seat in Western PA, so they wanted to go with a conservative Dem who is also a team player instead of a selfish douchebag who could only be counted on not being counted on.
shortstop
If you strike at the Nancy, you must kill the Nancy.
I hope she allowed herself a private happy dance last night.
PeakVT
@amk: Manchin would be a Blue Dog if he was in the House. The Senate doesn’t have formal caucuses like the House does.
Cris (without an H)
When the other side does this, we derisively call them “purity purges” or something like that. That’s not to say this is bad; quite the contrary, this should remind us that there’s merit in the purity test. If you’ve got bad Democrats, primary them with better ones.
Tractarian
Yeah, the lesson is “Be a Democrat Running for Office in San Francisco.”
In all seriousness, I’m glad to see Altmire and the other blue dogs go. But let’s not pretend that a Pelosi-type firebrand would play all over the country. I’m willing to keep a few blue dogs on board as long as they don’t actively run against the President or sabotage his agenda.
amk
@PeakVT: I know. I am talking about backstabbing aptitude.
SatanicPanic
Poor little feller
cmorenc
Schuler’s “voluntary” retirement from N.C.’s 11th Congressional District should be a prime object lesson for any Blue Dog Democrat purportedly voting that way to attempt to cater to conservative-leaning segments of the electorate back home: rather than welcoming you as a GOP-lite kindred spirit, the GOP regards you instead as an untrustworthy turncoat to your own kind, and will eagerly, happily stick a shiv in your back at first opportunity. Even though Schuler was probably about the best the Dems could do for an actually electable candidate in N.C.’s 11th congressional district, as it was formerly drawn, the GOP-controlled state legislature redrew the 11th to make absolutely sure that even the bluest of blue-dog dems could not win by splitting the relatively progressive oasis of Asheville between two otherwise very red districts. Both Schuler (one of the bluest of blue dogs) and Brad Miller (a more bona fide moderate progressive from Raleigh) were quite deliberately gerrymandered into unwinnable districts (Miller by redrawing his home into popular incumbent David Price’s district and splitting the rest of his former district asunder).
gaz
@amk:
What’s the real difference? At least the teatard won’t be backstabbing our caucus.
Punish the clowns. I don’t mind a conserva-dem to a degree. That’s not what we have here. We have ultraright guys with a D label. It’s high time we punished them for it.
I’m willing to give the less rabid ones a bit of a pass, but I think your overton window needs some polishing.
amk
@gaz: overton, bloverton – Those districts are gonna yield you only those three types. Deal with it.
Cris (without an H)
Well, the obvious difference is that they fit in the “more” part of the “more and better” strategy. I don’t want Blue Dogs and DLC centrists to make up the majority of the caucus, but I’ll take a few here and there if they help make the caucus the majority.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@4tehlulz: Blue Dogs aren’t going to give me what I want – save control of the Senate or House. A lot of the districts these guys are coming from, you’re not going to get a better candidate. You’re just not.
That being said, so long as they vote in lockstep when told to on the important stuff, I don’t care what they do otherwise. He just watched the guy he’s replacing get the electoral equivalent of the horse’s head in the bed for threatening repeal. I think that’s an object lesson that will stick.
He may be too stupid to learn, but I think he’s probably not. He’ll fuck us in some other fashion, but man, you gotta start purging these guys somewhere.
Ben Cisco
@cmorenc: Beat me to posting the same thing. Great point.
geg6
@Vlad:
Heh. Me, too.
I’ll just paste what I said in the open thread this morning:
geg6
@Tractarian:
Well then, this race worked out exactly as it should have. No Dem who isn’t a bit of a Blue Dog will EVER win Southwestern PA, but Critz is the very definition of loyal and will vote pretty much the same as his old boss, John Murtha, did.
Paul in KY
@Xecky Gilchrist: For Utah, he’s a crazy hippy.
Paul in KY
@Lev: Pres. Truman said it long ago: ‘If you give people the choice between a fake Republican and a real Republican, they’ll vote for the real Republican every time’.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Paul in KY: True enough. I prefer him to the alternatives, just mentioning that he might be in trouble since this thread was about Blue Dogs leaving.
He might not be so bad off as it seems, though – he’s survived tough elections before.
karen
But in Red states, will the “real Democrat” win the general election?
PeakVT
Here’s some data for the 112th Congress on votes with party (click party to sort). Altmire was the 5th least likely to vote with his/her party, and Matheson was 2nd least likely.
FlipYrWhig
@Cris (without an H):
Well, that’s just it. What if the median Democrat nationwide is a labor-leaning, hawkish social conservative? I don’t think we can just suppose that the biggest chunk of Democrats is the liberal bloc, who readily agree on war, economics, and the civil rights of ethnic and sexual minorities, and then we just fill in with a few corporatists and social conservatives to get over the top. That’s not the composition of the party. The whole thing is a mishmash.
The worst offenders are the ones like Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh, who are wishy-washy on just about every issue, leading to no one liking them outside their own states and not that many liking them with any fervor inside those states.
But in the blogosphere even someone like Marcy Kaptur or (when she was in the House) Kirsten Gillibrand will get pilloried for insufficient ideological zeal. If they’re not good enough, then the number of people who _are_ good enough is minuscule, in which case seeing “real Democrats” as nearly a majority becomes logistically impossible.
ruemara
I love how Blue Dogs are all RAAAAAAHM’s fault. You do realize that with the 50 states strategy, you find people capable of winning in those states, not people who fit the mold of progressive dreams every where? Why doesn’t Howard Dean share even a portion of the blame for Blue Dogs?
Tony
As a resident of the part of PA-12 that used to be Altmire’s PA-04, I’m thrilled to see Altmire go down in flames. He did rid us of the despicable Melissa Hart, and deserves credit for that, but was a crass political opportunist and cookie-cutter conservadem that would fit right in in an R+20 district (PA-04 was R+6, so he wasn’t going to be a lefty, but, still…)
Critz is no prize, either, but his conservative leanings have tended to be on the social side, where it can be argued that the policies have less potential to do do damage.
I don’t know much about the Republican, Keith Rothfus, but I do know Altmire was able to hold him off in the 2010 “Tea Party Slime Wave” election, so Critz has to feel pretty good about his chances.
FlipYrWhig
@karen: There’s one school of thought that insists that it’s worth running Real Democrats everywhere, even if they lose in the short term, because it changes the debate and (to use terrible marketing-speak) builds the brand. But that also means a lot of losing and a lot of waiting out the damage done by Republicans winning. The other school of thought is to accept that you’re not going to get Real Democrats everywhere, so you back the best option on hand, even if it’s Joe Manchin, because at least that way you mitigate the damage the Republicans would do if they were unfettered.
Paul in KY
@Xecky Gilchrist: I would certainly prefer him in congress to any Utah Repub. He’s not a complete clone of Republicans, anyway.
Vlad
@ruemara: There’s a significant difference between Reps who don’t “fit the mold of progressive dreams every where,” and Reps like Altmire who are actively trying to stage a mutiny against the goddamn Speaker.
My district’s red, but it’s not THAT red.
Paul in KY
@karen: I think what Pres. Truman is saying is you have to differentiate yourself from the Republican in some meaningful way. You have to speak up for unions, be for progressive taxation, etc.
Show how you are different (in some areas) than the Republican opponent, cause if you are a clone, they’ll vote for the Republican.
FlipYrWhig
@ruemara: Hey, it’s not like Howard Dean said he wanted to appeal to voters with rebel flag stickers on their pickup trucks. :P
I feel like “Blue Dog” is too broadly used, just the way “DLC” used to be. It’s more like there are, at a minimum, (1) pro-business conservative Democrats, (2) social conservative Democrats, (3) vocally disloyal Democrats. Some people are more aggravated by (1), some by (2), some by (3). When your guy is all three, that’s a sorry state of affairs indeed.
Altmire strikes me as a (1) and a (3). Someone like Stupak is more of a (2), and Critz is a (2). But I think you’re going to get (2)s from the Rust Belt and Sun Belt, and they’re going to cause trouble on gender, sexuality, and ethnicity rather often, and if you don’t want them, you need to resign yourself to having way less than a majority for many years. And ETA ideological consensus is cancelled by small size, at least if you think the purpose of government is to solve difficult problems rather than to make you symbolically and affectively feel a sense of value and self-esteem.
ruemara
@Vlad: Trust me, I get that. But that’s politics. Self-serving bastards everywhere and knife in every back. I get to work with them daily. Some are awesome, even personally. A lot only seem nice and I’ve seen some amazing shivs in the past 3 years alone. And that’s just here in the state.
TooManyJens
@FlipYrWhig:
Nicely put.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Yep. My rep here in the Fightin’ 29th (as Stephen Colbert called us) is an official Blue Dog, but he’s a pro-business Democrat who votes with the party on important stuff like healthcare reform, so he’s okay. There is a very large immigrant community in this district (not just Latino, but also a huge Armenian population and a growing Korean one) so he’s not the socially liberal firebrand you’d get further north, but he’d never refuse to vote for a women’s health bill.
At this point, it’s the disloyal social conservatives that bug me most. When Nancy P. was Speaker, she was almost always able to figure out ways that the more conservative Blue Dogs could do protest votes while still getting the vote through, and it drives me nuts to see people spit in her (and the party’s) face even after she accommodates their supposed objections.
Some Loser
I don’t dislike Blue Dogs because I disagree with them on some issues; I hate them because they are usually traitorous asses. Do they understand what a party is? If they hate Democrats so much, then why don’t they join the Republicans?
FlipYrWhig
@TooManyJens: Thx. I think I’m adapting something Davis X. Machina has said a lot…
FlipYrWhig
@Some Loser: They like the idea of running as “Not Republican, Democrat. But not the kind of Democrat who takes guns, cowers at war, coddles criminals, hugs trees, and gives away free stuff to Negroes. A different kind, responsible, non-threatening, and smiley.” That’s the pitch.
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
Totally understandable point. Let’s make sure to be honest enough, though, about the reasons why progress on certain fronts gets stalled through the acts of people who should normally be allies.
pseudonymous in nc
Shuler’s protege is in the Dem primary for the 11th, and Shuler’s ridiculously-named PAC “3rd and Long” (should be “Sacked For 15”) is spending money on other Dem primary candidates. He’s not out of politics yet, more’s the pity. The Dems in NC have been pretty much screwed anyway by fiendish redistricting: a reminder never to lose an election in a census year.
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: Sure, by all means. But it kind of depends on how you squeeze the balloon. You can probably get the liberals and the working class social conservatives together on economic issues, and you can probably get the liberals and the corporatist conservatives together on social issues (on the theory that black, gay, female, and Latino money all spend the same), but there aren’t enough liberals to accomplish anything with only the liberals on board. It sucks, but that’s where we are. Coming up with something that appeals to all of them at once is very hard and involves watering it down (from a liberal perspective). And then, think of something like the Keystone Pipeline. On that, it’s really the green liberals who are the holdouts, and both the blue-collars and the corporatists would love to go ahead with it.
For whatever reason, I think too many people are prone to thinking that the Real/Liberal Democrats are the dog and the Fake/Conservative Democrats are the tail. But I’m not so sure about that. Sometimes there’s no way to tell which is the tail and which is the dog. Or it’s Schrodinger’s dog.
Someguy
It’s great to have party purity but what some people miss is that a lot of Apostasy votes are actually whipped and consented to by party leadership with the goal of preserving a particular seat in one of the rare contested districts. You need to figure out whether having the party in general control in Congress is more important than having a smaller, purer party that will tend to spend long periods in the desert. Altmire cast one vote that really mattered: that was the vote for speaker.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to get rid of Altmire, it sends a good message to others thinking about heresy… but Critz has to run in a district that went for McCain, Worst Candidate Ever, by 54:46. Altmire was probably the most liberal candidate who could run there. Holden, another bluedoggy Pennsyltuckian is gone too. As you’re gnashing your teeth about the new Teatard Congressmen in PA this upcoming November, I hope you remember this moment of celebration. Notice I’m not hoping anybody will learn from this, because hoping for Democrats to learn from experiences like this is futile.
And speaking of Teatards, the strategy of wiping out viable candidates for less viable, more ideologically pure candidates who then go on to get crushed in the general is known as the O’Donnell Maneuver. It’s like the Immelman Turn except the endgame of this acrobatic maneuver occurs when your plane flies straight into the ground.
Some Loser
@FlipYrWhig:
No matter what you do, for whatever reason, or how well you do it, someone will hate you for it.
FlipYrWhig
@Someguy: Well, these aren’t “more ideologically pure” candidates. They’re a different ideological mix, roughly speaking something like labor-conservative rather than management-conservative.
But IMHO you’re right on the larger point, which is that there are limits to what districts will bear, and most places you can’t run as a pro-environment, pro-gay, pro-woman, pro-labor, pro-immigrant, anti-war, anti-gun, anti-prohibition, anti-church class-warrior bleeding-heart and have a chance in hell at winning. And for damn sure there’s not a group of 200 people already like that in office, dealing from a position of strength, just trying to finesse the next few votes they need from a handful of Altmires who accidentally got elected somehow.
Linnaeus
@Someguy:
I agree that there are limits on the kinds of viable candidates you can get based on the makeup of a particular district. I suspect that a lot of the so-called “purists” aren’t for the most part actually purists, but they’re worried about what they see as a party that is ideologically becoming too diffuse and as a result is left to only fighting rear-guard actions in defense of a legacy built in a previous epoch in American politics.
Catsy
@amk:
Sometimes, yes, but there’s more to it than simply cold calculation over how many people we elect with a (D) beside their name.
Some Blue Dogs–and their DINO counterparts in the Senate–do vote the right way on certain issues. Maybe they’re not insane about student loans, or labor unions. Maybe they don’t support a woman’s right to choose but they won’t vote for punitive anti-abortion laws either.
That has value. And on some very, very close votes, they can make the difference.
But IMO whatever value these “Fox News Democrats” provide by voting the “right” way on a handful of specific issues is vastly outweighed by their propaganda value to Republicans. People like these give faux bipartisan cover to Republican shenanigans and help reinforce right-wing frames as “bipartisan”. They go on TV and trash their own party and its agenda, handing the GOP endless sound bites.
Worst of all, they are the #1 reason why the “both sides do it” horseshit has legs with low-information voters. That does lasting damage with a scope far beyond any single election, let alone any single vote. It is for this last reason more than any other that in some cases I do think a real Republican can do less damage to us than a fake Democrat in the same seat. At least when the Republican gets birther-curious, trashes the Dems or votes against women’s rights, the right party gets the blame and it reinforces the truth about Republican extremism rather than the dangerous lie of false equivalency.
Dave Anderson
@Someguy: You do know that Critz ran and won in PA-12 (old lines), a lean-Republican seat, in 2010 multiple times. I wish Critz was a DFH, he isn’t, he is a socially conservative Dem who is decent on economic issues that are not related to extractive industries.
The big difference between Altmire and Critz is that Altmire has demonstrated to all of his original allies (excluding health care providers) that he can not be trusted on his word. Critz will wander off the reservation, but he tells people about his probable wonderings with plenty of warning. He also does not needlessly hippy punch.
BubbaDave
@Catsy:
This.
Also, this. We can’t win every battle, but where we lose we need to be able to provide a clear contrast with the Republicans. Altmire and his ilk get in the way of that. Good riddance.
Someguy
@Dave Anderson:
Yep. And you’ve given up Incumbent Advantage to get Critz in there. The Teatards larned me a couple things in 2010. One thing is that I’m not going to get my way except in a hundred or so districts, I’ll mostly get my way in another hundred or so, and there’s 200 where I’m shit out of luck. There’s another hundred or so where it’s important to have the right person in there, and that person may look like Critz or Holden or Altmire at times.
Chuck Butcher
It’s not quite a coin toss in this case, but it is close. One thing, people who want a GOPer will eventually vote for one and trying to make the difference indiscernible doesn’t work well. There are political costs to such stragegies, one is the drift rightward in politics in general.
The Teatard examples are not illustrative, what that shows is in a fair number of elections out and out stupid crazy doesn’t work. This assumes that the “left” presentation to voters is equally stupid crazy. LIEberman isn’t even an example if you consider the GOP strategy in that election of sinking their own candidate.
When making these kinds of analysis it matters that pretty regularly when the political component is scrubbed from policy questions people majority poll progressive in attitudes and that is regardless of most districts. That pushes the conversation in some interesting directions.
FlipYrWhig
@Chuck Butcher: The majority of (white) people are progressive in attitude until they are prodded to consider how willing they really are to share benefits with Those People. I wish I could remember whose study that was, but IIRC the upshot was that support for a strong social-welfare safety net was inversely correlated with social diversity, i.e., people are willing to share with people like themselves, less so with people unlike themselves.
goblue72
The caption in the photo in the linked article notes:
“Congressman Mark Critz shows his ID to Kelly Swanson, minority inspector at precinct 17-2, as he prepares to vote in primary elections, at St. Patrick’s Church Hall, in Johnstown, Pa.”
I realize that “minority inspector” has a specific meaning in the context of poll workers (essentially, its the ‘second’ poll inspector, after the ‘majority inspector’) – but given that PA’s GOP controlled legislature passed a “Keep Brown People from Voting” Voter ID, the irony is delicious.
JoyfulA
@Someguy: Holden lost because the Republican redistricters after the 2010 census gave him a strongly Democratic district, which wanted a real Democrat and nominated one. (For the 2000 census redistricting, Holden was redistricted from a slightly Democratic district into a Republican district, which he won and retained, even when Republicans ran Joe Paterno’s son against him. Republicans liked him enough.)
He had a long run in the House, 20 years I think, but the people have spoken.
OzoneR
Get back to me when the Blue Dogs are gone AND we have 235 Democrats in the House.
David Anderson
@Someguy: One incumbent was going to lose in PA-12 because it is a mash-up of PA-4 and PA-12 from the old lines. Both those seats were Democratically held but due to both relative state population loss compared to the nation and population redistribution back east, Western Pennsylvania was going to take a net seat loss. It was just a matter of what incumbent loss — not Doyle in the PA-14 Pittsburgh vote sink but one of the suburban/mountain Dems.
Anyhow, Rothfus, the Republican opponent is also from Altmire’s old district, so he is introducing himself to the voters for the first time instead of repeating 2010.