Blue Dogs to the Rescue

Conservative Republicans in Congress may out-numbered but they may still be in the majority.

The real fiscal policy battle is going to be among liberal and conservative Democrats, the “Blue Dogs” as they are known, and they seem to think Barack Obama is one of them.

“Barack totally gets it . . . He is smarter than Bill Clinton and disciplined.” So says Tennessee Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper on the Thursday before Mr. Obama’s inauguration.

Sitting in his office a stone’s throw from where the festivities will take place, I ask about his role in the big transformation coming to Washington. He’s one of the leaders of a gang of moderate Democrats called the Blue Dogs. They’re meeting their first Democratic president in a while, and Mr. Cooper may have a big effect on the agenda. He smiles gently and says, “If we were to ally with the Republicans, we could swing any vote in the House of Representatives.”

The Blue Dogs gang is growing and is made up of a number of Democrats that didn’t vote for the first Stimuless Package, or the Big Three (…Two…One) Bailout, are against tax increases and actually favor “targeted” tax cuts.

So far they want to play nice with Lefty Pond Scum like Frank ‘n Beans, Pelosi and Reid, but this could be the makings of a surprise and possibly epic battle for the high ground.

If they are inclined to wrangle with Nancy Pelosi and the more liberal contingent in the Democratic Party, they will drive policy, especially as a check on spending. “Ideally the White House will see things our way, so they will present legislation on the Hill that we find acceptable,” Mr. Cooper says. “If they stray too much from that or if a certain part of Congress strays too much from that, then we may have to object.”

But is Barack one of them?

Obama To Hold Fiscal Responsibility Summit

Obama said that he has made clear to his advisers that some of the difficult choices–particularly in regards to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare – should be made on his watch. “We’ve kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road,” he said.

The question is whether Obama actually used the perjorative “entitlement” and whether his idea of “choices” is cutting benefits and/or forcing Social Security and other entitlements to do more with less…or just raising taxes.

If the Blue Dogs are right, we might actually have another Bill Clinton on our hands, one that won’t dip his pen in the company ink (Michelle would rip his head off I surmise), which given the fiscal policies of GWB, might be Change^© we fiscal conservatives can live with.

…albeit given the lack of choice in the matter for the next two to four years.

But what of the monster stimulus package? What doth the Chien Bleu say of that?

“…I think there are infrastructure things that are legitimate to spend money on,” like the interstate highway system. “For the stimulus package to work in the economy, you have to have long-term credibility. If people think we are inviting inflation back in, or if we’re not going to prudently manage the nation’s finances, the stimulus package is largely a waste of time.”

A great thing about Mr. Obama’s plan, he says, is the tax cuts. “I think stimulus can come in a variety of forms, but I think the key message is Democrats are not for tax increases. Democrats can be for tax cuts when appropriate, when needed, when targeted. We can argue about the type of cut, but the key element of this proposal was facing the payroll tax. That is the most regressive, most antijob tax in America and very few presidents in American history have touched it. And Barack is touching it in this package. That is an achievement of immense proportions in and of itself.”

I’m still not convinced this stimulus will stimulate anything and I remain skeptical of Barack Obama’s definition of a “tax cut.”

In the mean time, check out these quotes…from a Democrat no less…Blue Dog Cooper:

[The deficit is] even worse than most people think, he says, because of dodgy accounting used by the federal government.

“The U.S. government uses cash accounting,” he says. “That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam.”

Barack Obama is inheriting over $60 trillion of problems. This is not counting the bailout, or Social Security or anything.”

Standard & Poor’s reported that the U.S. Treasury bond would lose its AAA rating by 2012 because of the way Washington has been carrying on. America would have the same credit rating as Estonia and Greece, and then the same as Poland and Brazil, and then it would be like . . . Mexico. “Yet no one knows about this,” he says.

We will be watching Congressman Cooper and his Dogs.

Let the battle begin.