The object of the “Bush Dog” campaign (OpenLeft has its own logo for it, along with a link enabling readers to “sign up to fight the Bush Dogs”) is initiallly to solicit “profiles” of errant Members, weigh their relative perfidy, publicize their records, and pressure them to mend their ways. There’s no question the campaign is being timed to anticipate a late-September/early-October vote on the FY 2008 supplemental appropriations bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, with Bush calling for an additional $197 billion unencumbered by any troop withdrawal mandates.
But there’s pretty clearly a broader agenda for the campaign beyond “whipping” future Iraq votes in Congress, as reflected in Stoller’s many hints that some Bush Dogs should face primary challenges next year. After all, Stoller and Chris Bowers left their old haunts at MyDD and set up OpenLeft in no small part because they were convinced that it was time for netrooters to begin to pivot from a strictly partisan to a more ideological perspective, demanding progressive rigor from Democrats and threatening grass-roots retribution against those impeding a “progressive governing majority,” as they see it. Targeting incumbent Democrats who’ve voted, as Stoller puts it, for “capitulation [to Bush] on Iraq” and to “expand Bush’s wiretapping powers” does indeed seem like a good wedge to convince netroots folk furious about both votes to take the next step beyond the united-front effort of 2006 and towards a more ideological definition of what it means to be a Democrat.
The “wedginess” of the campaign, and perhaps it’s most troubling feature, lies in the monniker “Bush Dogs,” which obviously ramps up the rhetoric a notch from previous epiteths for straying party moderates (“conservatives,” “Republican Lite,” etc.). And the two-vote litmus test OpenLeft offers for “BushDogs” ignores pretty vast differences in party fidelity among the group. According to a CQ article on party unity in the first six months of this Congress (which generally found unusually high Democratic unity in the House and in the Senate, as compared to past caucuses and to the GOP opposition), “Bush Dog” Gene Taylor trailed the entire caucus by voting with fellow Dems only 69% of the time. Freshman Members from districts carried by Bush in 2004, such as Melissa Bean of IL (82% unity score), Zach Space of OH (83%) and Gabby Giffords of AZ (87%), strayed far less. And though I don’t have access to CQ’s full study, it’s safe to assume a significant number of the “Bush Dogs” voted with Democrats well over 90% of the time. Granting, of course, that votes on Iraq and FISA were far more important than many others, is the “Bush Dog” label, suggesting slavish submission to the president and the GOP, really justified for most of these people?
The “Bush Dog” list has some pretty interesting names. There’s Ciro Rodriguez of TX, whose narrow-miss 2006 primary challenge to Rep. Henry Cuellar was a national netroots cause, and something of a tune-up for the Lamont-Lieberman primary (a few months later, Rodriguez won a primary in a different district after a court-ordered change in distict lines). And there’s Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of SD and Ben Chandler of KY, whose names are always the first cited by Markos Moulitsas to show netroots willingness to support mildly heterodox Democrats in red districts. Are they all closer to Bush than to the Democratic Party?
The questionable nature of the epithet, and its power to fuel a serious intraparty fight, is intensified when you look at one of the two votes, the Iraq supplemental bill. You may recall that the vote was preceded by an earlier struggle when nearly all House Dems voted for a bill that included a troop withdrawal timetable (the language was watered down in the Senate, and the conference report was vetoed by Bush). The “capitulation” in the final vote was on the question of whether Dems should go to the mats to deny the Pentagon any new money for Iraq and Afghanistan until such time as Bush accepted a withdrawal plan. Fully 86 House Dems voted to “capitulate,” including the number two, three, and four Members of the House Democratic Leadership (Hoyer, Clyburne and Emanuel) along with Jack Murtha, until quite recently the unquestioned leader of the “confrontation caucus” among House antiwar Democrats. These gents were just a FISA vote away from being labeled “Bush Dogs,” and given the focus of the campaign on the upcoming Iraq vote (and Stoller’s insistence, viz, Brian Baird, that failure to “stop the war” is of itself sufficient for anathemization), could still wind up with the dog collar.