Yes, Obama claims he is a blue dog. In private that is. If he said it publicly it would be the first time he made the entire country laugh out loud. Actually, a good laugh is just what we need right now. Come on. Barack, say it so’s we can hear you.
For the politically uninitiated, a Blue Dog Democrat is a conservative Democrat. The operative verb now is “was” not “is” because Blue Dog Democrats are essentially extinct, at least in Washington. Senator Sam Irvin may have been the last one that ever went to Washington. Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson might have been Blue Dogs. Except the term mainly refers to House members not Senators and might not have even been in the political lexicon until after those three were long gone. Anyway, a Blue Dog Democrat is one that eschews ideology and party loyalty and favors compromise with other factions. That’s what makes it harebrained preposterous for Obama to claim he is a Blue Dog, even privately. The man who crammed Obamacare down the throats of the American people without a single Republican vote is not someone who compromises. We know Obama lies to everybody else (e.g., “If you like the health plan you have now you can keep it.”), and if he thinks he is a Blue Dog he apparently lies to himself just as unashamedly.
Obama being a student of Sol Alinskiy’s Rules for Radicals, along with Hillary Clinton, it’s not just laughable nonsense for him to claim to be a Blue Dog Democrat. It’s nonsense on stilts.
I’m not sure what you call compromise. I think that President Obama worked pretty hard with the Republicans during the lame duck session. He was able to get some progress made on the budget, he got DADT repealled, and financial reform. I think that at heart, President Obama is a Blue Dawg becasue he wants to work with other people to get things done. But, as so many others have said, you have to have someone to bargain with and the Republicans and Teapublicans have no desire to talk and compromise on anything. All they want is getting what they want.
Blue Dawg 2012