Throwing out the baby with the bath water; very sad indeed: Blue Dogs Face Sharp Losses in Midterms

Gerald Seib writes in The Wall Street Journal:

More than half the members of the Blue Dog Coalition—the organization of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House—are in peril in next week's election, a stark indicator of how the balloting could produce a Congress even more polarized than the current one.

The Blue Dogs are often seen as a kind of human bridge, connecting left and right in the House. But that bridge is imperiled by the coming Republican wave in midterm elections, the most stark example of how the midterms are likely to weaken Capitol Hill's political center.

Of 54 Blue Dogs in the House, six already have retired or decided to seek other offices. Of those trying to stay, 39 are in competitive races, according to the Cook Political Report, and 22 of those are in pure toss-ups.

[T]he Blue Dog population could be cut significantly, conceivably by half, in next week's voting.

Blue Dogs tend to come from more conservative swing districts, where their hold on their seats is more tenuous in any case, and where voters are more likely to move right when the national winds push strongly in that direction.

"This is going to be a very tough election for the Blue Dogs, because many of them had success in districts where Democrats are always an endangered species," says Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a think tank promoting the ideas of moderate Democrats. "If they lose, some of them may come back in a future wave election, but those are never safe seats."

Meantime, liberal Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers and Henry Waxman hail from reliably Democratic districts, and they will be returning.

The upshot is one of the great political ironies of the year: A national conservative wave will hit hardest not at the most liberal Democrats, but at the most conservative Democrats. The Democratic caucus left behind will be, on balance, more liberal than it was before the election.

Meantime, a similar dynamic, only in the opposite direction, will be unfolding within the Republican House caucus. The election figures to bring to Washington some 50 newcomers on the Republican side—some of whom will replace retiring Republicans, others who will take over Democratic seats—and few of them are from the political center.

Instead, the tea-party movement has helped produce a crop of Republican newcomers who are ideologically to the right, and often quite intense about their views. "These people aren't interested in coming here to compromise," said one senior GOP House aide.

The net result will be a Republican House caucus pushed to the right by its newest members. The space vacated in this process will be the ideological center. That old line from Texas populist Jim Hightower—"There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos"—will feel prescient.

It's a similar story in the Senate. There, the center is being thinned by the retirements of Democrats Evan Bayh of Indiana and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, and Republican George Voinovich of Ohio, all lawmakers with a proclivity to reach across the partisan divide.

Meantime, Sen. Edward Kennedy, the leading example of a liberal Democrat who could work with conservatives, has died. And Sen. John McCain, once known as the maverick Republican ready to work with the other party, seems to have lost his appetite for doing so after enduring a bitter presidential election and an equally bitter conservative challenge from within his own party this year.

Simultaneously, the election figures to produce a full-blown caucus of tea-party adherents in the Senate, which will push the center of gravity among Republicans there to the right. The new Senate could well include Republican tea-party favorites Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, Ken Buck of Colorado, Joe Miller of Alaska and, perhaps, Sharron Angle of Nevada.

They will represent a batch of very conservative new senators who have been engaged in campaigns in which they often explicitly rejected the idea of centrist compromises.

Beyond that, senators from both parties have been chastened this year by the defeat of Republican colleagues Robert Bennett of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska at the hands of more conservative foes in primary fights, and the bitter primary campaign waged against moderate Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas by liberals from within her own party. Those primary battles are being read as a signal that senators in both parties risk paying a high price within their own parties for reaching across the ideological divide toward the middle. So the center figures to be more lonely in the Senate as well.

Within the Democratic party, many expect this process to produce a vigorous, perhaps nasty, internal debate about the ideological direction of the party. Already some on the party's left are complaining that the centrists who will lose didn't support the party's signature legislative initiatives, such as the health-care overhaul, and that their departure should be seen as a sign the party would be better off pursuing a more liberal agenda that would please and fire up its base.

William Galston, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution, who was in President Bill Clinton's White House when Democrats went through a similarly wrenching midterm in 1994, says "it is inevitable" that a debate about the ideological course of the party will break out after Nov. 2. "It can take healthy forms, or it can take unhealthy forms."