The Blue Dog Family Tree

By: Dave

If you are trying to keep up with what is going on nationally with health care, you may have encountered an animal called a blue dog. Are you asking yourself, what in the world is this? Well, let me help you out. A blue dog is a Democrat that primarily comes from the South and politically sits to the right of the rest of the Democrat Party, but left of the Republicans, except those Republicans from the Northeast. But this is about blue dogs, not rinos, that is for another day. The blue dog has just turned 15 years old and is acting like a true teen-ager and is rebelling against Mama Pelosi. Now, to really understand the blue dog, you have to examine its family tree.

The lineage gets lost before the 1920’s, but in the 1928 presidential election, a group of Southern Democrats, mainly from the old Confederacy border states of Kentucky and Tennessee, were in a real bind on whom to support for President. Al Smith, the Governor of New York and a Roman Catholic, was the Democrat nominee. When pressed, a prominent Southern Democrat stated he would rather vote for a yellow dog before he would vote for a Republican, even if the democrat was a Northern Catholic. Thus the breed was born.

You have to remember that prior to the 1930 Congressional elections; US politics was fractured into several political movements and multiple political parties. The Democrats and the Republicans were the two largest, but you had socialists, the American Communists, the Grange, and others. The Democrats were the home for the labor movement and university elites, at least those elites who were not socialists or communists. The Republicans were generally the business and industry leaders. The Grange was a Midwestern farm movement. And there were others. But with the collapse of the stock market in 1929, it turned out to be really fortunate for the democrats that their yellow dog lost to Mr. Hoover, the democrats first rode a electoral wave in 1930 and then again in 1932 that generally kept them in power until the 1990’s. During the 1930’s, as the Great Depression worsened and the Dust Bowl hit the Great Plains, businesses, industry and agriculture all collapsed. Seizing on this, the democrats successfully pulled all of the stray dogs from the various political movements, except the Republicans, into their party and ruled the country until the end of WWII.

With the war over and veterans returning home, people started to drift back to their old ways. The democrat coalition that had dominated the country for 16 years began to fracture. In the South, a group of democrats known as the Dixiecrats broke away from the party. All the talk of Civil Rights was too much for the Dixiecrats to bear. So in 1948 they nominated Strom Thurman of South Carolina for President. Yes, the same Strom Thurman who celebrated his 100^th birthday as a Republican Senator. Lloyd Bentsen may have known JFK as he so eloquently told the nation in the 1988 VP debate with Dan Quayle, but ole’ Strom new FDR, heck he knew Teddy Roosevelt, but that again is another story. This second generation of dogs stayed together through the George Wallace days of the 1960’s before quietly wandering off. When the main reason to stay together is to keep the south white, your days really are numbered.

The 3^rd generation of yellow dogs became known not as a dog but as an agricultural insect, the boll weevil. As the social activists of the 1960’s began to rise in power within the democrat party in the 1970’s, especially in 1974 after Watergate, the Southern Democrat once again felt the need to organize. With the great migration to the suburbs by Anglos in the 1970’s and the redistricting that followed after the 1980 Census, most southern cities began to hold large numbers of black democrats and most of their suburbs went Republican. That left only a few rural districts for the traditional Southern Democrat. It was in these rural southern districts that you could find the remaining boll weevils. When Ronald Reagan began building the largest Republican Coalition of the 20^th century, he successfully applied pesticide on the Democrats and picked off sizeable numbers in the South and Midwest. These people became known as Reagan democrats. Trying to survive during the Reagan years, boll weevils generally voted with the Republicans. Their peak of influence, which never was very much, was during the Bush 41 Presidency and the first two years of Clinton. However, when Newt Gingrich made his Contract with America in 1994, the boll weevils were finally eradicated.

So now we make it to the Blue Dogs. Basically, any southern democrat who survived in 1994, quietly reorganized as a blue dog. The blue comes from the color the television news gave the democrats and the dog is a reference to it being a 4^th generation yellow dog. Unlike previous attempts, this time they built an organization. The alpha dogs run this pack. The kennel now holds 52 dogs and has picked up some new breeds from rural New York, the Midwest and even Cal-ee-fornia. And as the War in Iraq became less popular, they were able to attract a few of their stray cousin Reagan Democrats back.

So now that you know them, let’s ask; are they an effective political group? History will say that their signature moment will be health care reform. Only time will tell us what their impact was, but to date they have been more bark than bite. However, we are in the dog days of summer, so if they ever do exert any influence, you would think this would be their season. But then again, most people try to go on vacation during these doggy summer days. So they may just wind up barking to themselves.