Hillary targets the Blue Dog voters

A new breed of conservative-leaning Democrats swung the midterm election, and could now unlock the door to the White House, writes Sarah Baxter

A COUPLE of years ago a small town — where the garden gnomes look like Uncle Sam, where there are almost as many churches as shops and where the local cleaning company is called Making Miracles — could have been marked down at a glance as Republican heartland.

After last week’s midterm elections, Bush country is no longer so easy to identify. Dumfries in Virginia, on the outskirts of the Marine Corps headquarters at Quantico, has been conservative for as long as anybody can remember. It still is. What has changed is that the voters elected Jim Webb, a proud “redneck” and right-wing Democrat, as their senator.

“For me, it was the war,” said Sandy Miller, a 56-year-old nurse, explaining her switch in support. “I just don’t think we should be over there in Iraq. They should be taking care of their own business.”

Miller regrets backing President George W Bush in 2004: “I’ve got nobody to blame but myself because I voted for him. I thought it was all terrorism, terrorism, but I was misled. I’d never vote for him again.”

Bush was in Dumfries on Friday to open the marines’ new $90m museum at Quantico. With its spire reflecting the angle of the famous flag planted by the marines at Iwo Jima, it would have been the perfect place for the commander-in-chief to savour victory.

“Years from now, when America looks out on a democratic Middle East growing in freedom and prosperity, Americans will speak of the battles like Falluja with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima,” Bush said hopefully.

History is more likely to record that it was here that Webb, a highly decorated ex-marine and former Republican navy secretary under Ronald Reagan, delivered a crippling blow to Bush’s presidency. Webb’s 8,805 majority in Virginia tipped control of the Senate to the Democrats after they had already won a projected 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Karl Rove, the architect of Bush’s second-term victory, had gambled that social conservatives would deliver another win, despite the war’s unpopularity. It had been his dream to build a permanent majority by persuading the “values voters” of middle America — Christian, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage and anti-gun control — to turn out for the Republicans at the polling booth.

He had not reckoned with the gun-toting Webb, whose son is serving in Iraq; nor Jon Tester, the senator-elect for Montana, a farmer with a buzz cut and three missing fingers; nor Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, who is anti-abortion, and a clutch of other socially conservative, economically populist Democratic candidates. “I’ve never seen so much raw testosterone in my life. The smell of sweaty jockstraps from the ‘new Democrats’ is overwhelming,” scoffed Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator.

Last week a new category of voters burst on the scene: the “Blue Dog” Democrats, conservative independents and moderates who turned on the scandal-ridden bungling Republicans. The future political map of America depends on whether the victorious Democrats can hold on to their support in 2008.

Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic national committee, is already preparing for Hillary Clinton’s likely presidential run. He believes the midterm results represent a potentially historic shift for his party.

“It was a ‘throw the Republicans out’ election. Some people voted for us reluctantly but we have a terrific opportunity to get back the Reagan Democrats we lost in the 1980s,” he said.

Will Clinton be able to rally the Blue Dogs to her banner or will they flock to her rival, Senator John McCain, the Republican front-runner? Could a political newcomer such as Senator Barack Obama capture their imagination? Perhaps the most important lesson of the midterms is that no party or person can take American voters for granted.

At his first post-election press conference at the White House, Bush admitted that he had not been prepared for the scale of the “thumping” that the Republicans received. “I thought we were going to do fine yesterday — shows what I know,” he said ruefully.

The legendary Republican base demonstrated last week that it was not the “God, guns and gays” monolith of the 2004 presidential election. Nearly a third of white evangelical voters had backed the Democrats.

Miller describes herself as a “devout Christian” but does not see why that should give Bush a pass on Iraq. Besides, she agrees with the Democrats rather than her church on the need for federal funding of stem cell research. “I’ve got a cousin with Parkinson’s disease,” she said.

Those who stuck by the Republicans were not carbon-copy “values voters” either. Gwen Reedy, 50, an advertising saleswoman in Dumfries, said: “I like George Bush and I like his ethics, even though we could be doing a lot better in Iraq.”

Yet she could have voted for an amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Virginia on Tuesday and did not bother. “I don’t see the need to legalise gay marriage, but I don’t really care what people do,” she said.

In the midterm elections, middle America rooted itself firmly in the centre-ground of US politics. After Iraq, hurricane Katrina, record budget deficits and corruption scandals, the electorate voted to “kick out the bums”, from the mountain states of Montana and Colorado to Missouri, Ohio and Indiana in the Midwest and the East Coast redoubts of conservatism in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

The verdict is the same for the Democrats as for the Republicans: ignore the centre at your peril. In Dumfries, a 51-year-old ex-marine who preferred to remain anonymous because he works at Quantico, said: “I voted for Webb. I like him because he speaks his mind but I still think of myself as a Republican. I’d vote for them again if they had the right candidate.”

At Webb’s headquarters in Arlington, jubilant campaign volunteers made it clear they were “conservative” Democrats first and foremost. Some had voted Republican before, such as Chris Kervorkian, 36, who worked for McCain’s Republican presidential nomination in 2000.

“I own a small business and I don’t want the government down my throat,” he said. “Big government doesn’t work.”

McAuliffe, a veteran of the Clinton years when there was a divided Congress and White House, knows that the groundwork for the next presidential election is being laid now.

“Our future in 2008 is directly tied to how we do in 2007,” he said. As a close friend of Bill Clinton, he was at the president’s side during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“If anyone wants to settle scores it’s me, but I’m in the camp that says ‘move ahead’. Rove dreamt of a permanent Republican majority and he blew it,” he said.

Bush is already practising his paces as a consensus politician, mindful that he does not want to leave office with approval ratings in the doldrums. “You’re seeing the George Bush who has always been adept at playing the hand he is dealt,” said Charlie Black, a Republican consultant.

The president has offered the Democrats some modest concessions, such as a promise to increase the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour. He also hopes to work with them on immigration reform, where his ideas for a guest worker programme are at odds with his own party’s.

Both sides are waiting for the report of the Iraq study group, co-chaired by James Baker, the former Republican secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, to offer bipartisan suggestions.

There are limits to the tentative courtship. Senate Democrats have already vowed to block the reappointment of John Bolton, the arch-conservative US ambassador to the United Nations. The likely Democratic committee chairmen in the House of Representatives are itching for retribution over Iraq. If the subpoenas start flying, there could be hand-to-hand combat in Congress.

Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House, has promised that there will be no effort to impeach Bush for supposedly misleading the public during the run-up to the war, but there will be vigorous “oversight”.

Senior Democrats with a shrewd eye on 2008 are seeking to limit the investigations to areas where their own side stands to look patriotic as opposed to weak on national security. An important test will be whether Congress blocks approval for warrantless wiretaps of phone calls between the United States and foreigners with suspected ties to terrorism, an issue that the Republicans hope to exploit.

A prime target for investigators will be the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The Downing Street memo about “fixing” the facts, leaked to The Sunday Times, will form a key part of the evidence.

The Democrats will also pore over no-bid contracts awarded to firms such as Halliburton and investigate the boggling levels of corruption in Iraq, where $9 billion of US taxpayers’ money has seemingly vanished into a black hole. According to a defence source there is plenty to uncover. “Americans won’t want their children dying for corrupt Iraqis,” the source said.

Few doubt that the behaviour of the Democrats in Congress will have a direct impact on the fortunes of the 2008 presidential candidates. Too much opposition and sympathy could swing back to the Republicans. Too much consensus and the Republicans could seem like “compassionate” conservatives and reconquer the centre.

Now the midterm elections are over, the race for the White House has started. McCain plans to set up a formal presidential “exploratory committee” next week. Last week’s punishment at the polls will have boosted his standing among demoralised Republicans as the candidate with the best chance of winning back conservative defectors.

He has taken the unpopular stance of arguing for more troops in Iraq, but his status as a former prisoner of war in Vietnam and his opposition to the torture of terrorist detainees has won him the trust of voters — although not diehard Republicans — on national security issues.

“I’ve always been popular with independents,” McCain said last week. “But I don’t know how independents feel right now. From what I see they are kind of unhappy.”

Mark McKinnon, a Bush loyalist who helped to run the 2004 campaign, said: “Voters said they want independence, they want bipartisanship and they want a voice of authority on Iraq and John McCain is all three.”

McCain faces a potential challenge from Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, who lacks the senator’s organisational muscle but has the greatest name recognition because of his courage during the September 11 attacks.

His personal life may count against him with social conservatives — he has been married three times — and he may find it difficult to win convincingly on his home turf after Hillary Clinton was re-elected to the Senate with 67% of the vote.

Clinton is not expected to announce that she is running until the new year. “All I’m doing is thinking about going back to work in Washington next week. I’m going to relish this victory,” she said.

“She has only just got through this campaign,” said McAuliffe. “The last thing she wants to do is to think about the next one.”

However, as Dick Morris, a former adviser to the Clintons, claimed in a recent book, they have been hoping for his-and-her presidencies ever since Bill won the White House in 1992.

Watchers of Hillary Clinton say that if she is wise she will draw to her side the macho Webb, boosting her credibility with Blue Dog Democrats across the rest of America in time for 2008. It could be tough going. One volunteer for Webb said dismissively: “She’s not a viable candidate. She’s trying to make herself into a conservative but she’s not.”

Another said: “My wife is a hippie liberal and she’s like, ‘I hope she doesn’t run’. We don’t need another hate figure like Bush.”

Some former members of Bill Clinton’s team are equally sceptical. One said: “It will be interesting to see if she decides to run. Her staff want her to, but she knows what she would have to endure. She’s not like Bill who can take that stuff, compartmentalise it and move on.”

At her heels is Obama, 45, the African-American senator for Illinois who has been in Congress for only two years. He has emerged to become Clinton’s top challenger on the back of a dazzling speech to the 2004 Democratic convention, an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s television show and a bestselling book, The Audacity of Hope, which argues for replacing “the endless clash of armies” with a politics rooted in “faith and inclusiveness”.

Obama has been reaching out to social conservatives and winning friends in Congress across the political divide — following Hillary Clinton’s model. Aides whisper that if he stands, he will launch an immediate drive for voter registration in the South in an effort to bring one of the last Republican strongholds into the Democratic fold.

Just as Clinton was piling up votes in New York last week — including 20% of Republicans and conservative voters in the rural upstate communities that she has wooed intensively — a new poll by Rasmussen found that Obama was sneaking up on her in popularity. About 29% of respondents picked Clinton as their first choice for the Democratic nomination, followed by 22% for Obama.

Among “liberal” (left-wing) voters, Obama leads her by 25% to 23%, largely because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Other potential candidates such as Al Gore (13%), John Edwards (10%) and John Kerry (4%) were left in the dust.

“I hope Obama runs,” said McAuliffe airily. “I say, bring them all in. The more the merrier. He’s got a great attractive story to tell.”

Other friends of Bill Clinton regard the Illinois senator as a dangerous rival. “He’s bright, appealing and he doesn’t carry Bill and Hillary’s baggage,” said one. “People are critical of his lack of experience, but he represents a new face and we’ve had presidents like Jack Kennedy who were inexperienced.”

Obama has a lot of ground to make up with the voters of Dumfries. “Who? What did you say his name was?” asked Miller. But the ex-marine had heard of the newcomer: “He’s very charismatic. I know more about Hillary than about him, but I know I’m not going to vote for her. She is not a conservative — she changes with the wind.”

In Dumfries the 2008 election is up for grabs. “I liked Bush’s father,” said Miller. But the elder Bush finished his presidency with dire approval ratings and was succeeded by a Clinton. Could it happen again? “I admire Hillary, she’s gone through a lot with Bill and she’s a survivor, but I don’t know,” Miller hesitated. “Part of me wants to say yes, because she’s a woman, although I wouldn’t want to vote for her just because of that. I can see Hillary having to fight everybody.”

Even so, she is more likely to vote for Clinton than McCain. As the Tories have found in Britain, when the political landscape shifts dramatically, it can take years to recover. It is going to take a while for the Republicans to win back her trust.

“You know?” Miller said brightly. “I think I’ll stick with the Democrats next time.”

The "Blue Dogs" are only disguising themselves as that because they would never get elected in states that vote that way and the Demonrats are looking at power so they get their phonies to run as such in the conservative leaning states and then they come to Congress and give liberalism lefties all the power and votes.

The liberal Dems dont care about their blue dogs as they are just there for the party to win the majority. The liberal Dems are smart enough to realise this, and the blue dog Dems realise their agenda is not important on the party.
On the other hand we Conservative Repubs seem to be causitic on the moderate Republicans and pour vitriol on them even though they are a minority and wont influence the agenda of the party. Republicans used to be good at strategy and alliance building, however they seem have to lost the ability to understand how politics works.

That might work if the "faith" is Islam, and "inclusiveness" means everybody is included in Islam. Otherwise, the nature of Islam makes "the endless clash of armies", well, endless.

This is my prediction.

A)The Blue Dog Democrats better keep their promise to Ronald Reagan Democrats. The sole purpose of being elected is to go to Washington to clean the house and give our government a new direction.

B) DNC is so desperate to regain power they used deception. Once the Blue Dogs get into office in Jan 2007 they will morph back into your typical far left liberals. This will get their constituents very upset because they used bait and switch tactics on them. You don't angry voters for the 2008 election.

C) If the Blue Dogs don't want to follow what the hard core liberals want this will change the face of the Democrat party forever. Blue Dogs infiltrated the party to dismantle it.

D) There are two wings of the Democrat party. The Kennedy elites and Clinton elites. They are fighting amongs themselves to gain power. Remember Bill Clinton got elected for being a New Democrat but got side tracked with the looney left. This is the reason why the Republicans gained the House in 1994.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council

Clinton warns not to tilt to far left.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/06/AR2005100601645_pf.html

First of all, if the blue dogs , who ran as conservatives, vote in line with Pelosi and Reid....they are doomed to being ousted in two years. Second of all, John McCain is the front runner according to the dems... He will never get the nod....

Hillary won't play well in the South, no matter how she postures. Just a fact.

But Hillary is going to play the Blue Dog Democrat. She is trying so hard to be a centralist...just like Zell Miller.

It's really going to be an interesting 2 years.

I'm not going to be involve with politics anymore. I'll vote but I'm going to start placing bets with a booky. It will have a calming effect on me.

Have my cake and eat it too!

Latest odds on the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections:

Hilary Clinton 7-2

Rudy Giuliani 10-1

John McCain 12-1

http://www.covers.com/articles/sb_articles.aspx?theArt=1290

People are betting on 2008 elections already.

This is from http://www.gamblerspalace.com/Lines.asp?IdLeague=315&IdSport=TNT

2001 HILLARY CLINTON 150
2002 JOHN MCCAIN 350
2003 MARK WARNER 800
2004 GEORGE ALLEN 600
2005 JOHN EDWARDS 600
2006 RUDOLPH GIULIANI 900
2007 BILL FRIST 2100
2008 CONDELEEZZA RICE 1500
2009 RICK SANTORUM 2500
2010 EVAN BAYH 1400
2011 MITCH ROMNEY 2200
2012 JOHN KERRY 2500
2013 AL GORE 2200
2014 JEB BUSH 2800
2015 BILL RICHARDSON 1800
2016 TOM RIDGE 2600
2017 ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER 2800
2018 TOM VILSACK

"At Webb’s headquarters in Arlington, jubilant campaign volunteers made it clear they were “conservative” Democrats first and foremost. Some had voted Republican before, such as Chris Kervorkian, 36, who worked for McCain’s Republican presidential nomination in 2000.

“I own a small business and I don’t want the government down my throat,” he said. “Big government doesn’t work.”

Well, I have news for you, Mr. Kervorkian, you just have voted to put in power the party of big government. Now, kindly place yourself in the right position since you can now expect the insertion of big government into your business and other affairs.

By the way, one does wonder whether Mr. Kervorkian may be related to someone else who specializes in suicide.

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