THE PRO-OBAMA NO VOTES:

Blue Dogs Bark (Christopher Hayes, March 2, 2009, The Nation)

The House of Representatives is a body that produces few stars, but Jim Cooper of Tennessee is a household name inside the Beltway. David Brooks has called him "one of the most thoughtful, cordial and well-prepared members of the House." He is viewed by the well-funded budget-hawk constituency as one of its most articulate advocates. Among his colleagues he has a reputation as a wonk and an intellectual--he even teaches a class at Vanderbilt University on health policy--and as the philosopher for the caucus of forty-nine conservative House Democrats known as the Blue Dogs. He gives off the slightly martyred air of someone who believes himself to be smarter than the people he works with.

In the past few weeks Cooper has emerged as the dissident-in-chief among House Democrats (a role he's been rehearsing since 1994, when his refusal to pull his "compromise" healthcare proposal helped kill the Clinton plan). Cooper was one of eleven Democrats--ten of them Blue Dogs--to vote against Obama's stimulus package. A few days after the vote, Cooper caused a stir when he suggested to a local radio station that Obama's aides had encouraged him to vote against their bill, a statement he had to walk back the next day.

When I spoke to Cooper the week after the vote, he defended it as counterintuitively pro-Obama, cast against "certain Congressional old habits and bad practices. A lot of our colleagues have not gotten the change message."

Exactly the line Republicans should take: they're just helping the President be true to the ideals he's articulated but which the old-time Democrats haven't adopted.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 23, 2009 8:04 PM