Anyone who's paid any attention to politics in the last six months knows how unhappy the nutroots are with the newly elected Democrats.
The problem isn't just that Republicans have snookered Democrats repeatedly by using procedural measures to block their agenda. The problem is that many of the Democrats elected under the Rahm Emanuel elect-a-Republican-lite approach.
As one story so wholesomely put it:
The so-called Blue Dogs like to think of themselves as Republican-lite. They come from mostly Southern and Western districts. They usually speak with a little bit of a drawl. They listen to country music. They are much more Sam Rayburn and much less Tip O’Neill, although Tip would have appreciated their mostly pro-life stances.
I'm surprised the author didn't say they're missing Mayberry:
Sitting on the porch drinking ice-cold cherry Coke
Where everything is black and white
duh na na na na na na na na
Picking on a six string
Where people pass by and you call them by their first name
Watching the clouds roll by
Bye, bye
The fact is, blue dog Democrats were elected from districts that have voted Republican for several cycles. These aren't screaming, anti-war fanatics, whacko environmentalists, or people who think spending an extra billion of taxpayer money is going to solve problems that are essentially personal in nature. They are people who have sent their sons and daughters off to war and may be disillusioned with that adventure. They're people who looked at the photos of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and thought the federal government "should have done more sooner." They're people who are frustrated with the GOP, who always said they were for fiscal restraint but who loved pork barrel spending as much as Democrats.
In other words, you can change the party affiliation of the person elected, but that doesn't mean the electorate has changed.
But the nutroots are furious that these blue dogs aren't voting with Grandma Pelosi and Harry Reid to end the war NOW, embarrass the president, and rescind the Patriot Act. Worse still, some of these blue dogs actually voted to extend FISA. How dare they!
So, what's a nutroot to do?
First, you start with threatening them.
It's not much to put up some google ads criticizing these members for their position on FISA. The way Google adwords works is that the ad will only show up for the search terms we select. That means that if we select 'Chris Carney', then people searching for Chris Carney (PA-04) will see an ad criticizing Chris Carney for his vote on FISA. And the people who are searching for Chris Carney are people who want to know more about Carney, like reporters, activists, and constituents. We can even geotarget his state, so only people in Pennsylvania see the ad.
It'll probably run around $100-150 per member for a six month period, which is the amount of time until the law must be reauthorized.
It's hard for me to believe that the constituents that elected Carney disagree with his vote on FISA. Why? Because new Congressmen are more attuned to the desires of their districts than fossils who have been in office for 30 years and think they are invincible. If Carney voted for FISA, that means he thinks more people in his district want him to vote that way.
The problem for the nutroots is that Congressmen always have to go home. They are accountable to the guy that pulls the lever in the voting booth, not the shrieking voices on the internet.
|