DEMOCRATS CAN’T GO TO THE DOGS:   The Blue Dogs, that is.  Emma Dumain at Roll Call has an interesting 20-year retrospective on the Blue Dog Coalition of Democrats in the House.   The Blue Dogs formally began in 1994, as a group of 23 conservative-moderate Southern Democrats.  Dumain observes that today’s Blue Dogs are trying to save the Democrat Party from its radical, progressive ideology:

In 2014, when Republicans shrunk Democratic numbers to their lowest since the end of World War II, a similar faction of fiscally conservative House Democrats came to a similar conclusion: The party’s progressives weren’t speaking to moderate voters.

The current political environment, with its ongoing debate over how Democrats can win elections and ugly fights over the “soul” of the party, makes for interesting parallels to what was going on 20 years ago, when the Blue Dog Coalition was born.

“We’ve learned the same lesson — at least some of us have learned the same lesson,” said Blue Dog Chairman Kurt Schrader, D-Ore. “You can’t continue to ignore big chunks of the American voter because you have certain ideological ideas.”

After 20 years, the Blue Dogs insist their mission is the same — they’re just trying to save the Democratic Party from itself.

Yeah, good luck with that.  The current Democrat Party has no soul, other than “win at all costs.”  While I empathize with the Blue Dogs’ alienation in an Obama-worshipping progressive Democrat Party, their effort to “repackage” their party as “moderate” is putting the cart before the horse in today’s political environment. Before they can convince Southern moderates–particularly white males–that the Democrat party “speaks” for them, the Democrat Party needs to actually speak for them–and at the very least stop being openly hostile to them.

I used to work on the Hill for a Southern Democrat from Texas who, while not a Blue Dog, was truly a moderate.  But that was back in the day, when the Democrat Party was a big tent, that welcomed even (gasp!) conservatives and moderates, at least on fiscal issues.  Those days are long gone, and will continue to be until the Democrat Party stops being the party of division and -isms (racism, sexism, genderism, classism, etc.) and starts putting the interest of America first.  I’m not confident they’re capable of doing this anytime soon, given that their 2016 presidential candidates– Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders–are already pledging fidelity to the “divide and conquer” strategy that has worked so effectively for Obama.

For the indefinite future, the Blue Dogs are stuck in the Democrat dog house.