Bring The Hammer Down On Rahm And The Blue Dogs!

Rahm Emanuel's always been harder on progressives than he is on the Blue Dog Democrats. After all, he was the one who recruited most of these Blue Dogs to run for office, and he's a major part of the reason why the Blue Dogs are working so hard to weaken health care reform in the House. He'd rather deal with the Blue Dogs from a policy standpoint because he erroneously believes that the country is "center-right" rather than "center-left" and that bipartisanship is what Americans want, rather than good policies that was promised by the party Americans voted into office. So giving in to the Blue Dogs makes sense to Rahm Emanuel, and to other aides in the White House from a policy standpoint.

It's that same old Village mentality of where the Democrats must always concede to the Republicans or to so-called "moderate" Democrats in order to pass legislation, regardless of whether they're in the majority or in the minority. Bipartisanship in Washington, D.C., means that Republican ideas must be agreed to in order to pass legislation even though none of these Republicans being courted will vote for the resulting legislation.

Did you know that the Blue Dog Caucus isn't even united on the issue of the public option? We have about 12 members of the Blue Dog Caucus that supports the inclusion of the public option in health care reform, and we only need three more Blue Dog Democrats on our side. It's why Rahm Emanuel should be focused on twisting their arms to support the House Tri-Committee bill without weakening it severely on the false claims of "cost containment."

Now that they're complaining, it's high time to increase the pressure by showing up at their Democratic town hall events and insisting that they take the Pledge to support the public option, and not to weaken the public option, or else they'll face a massive electoral loss in 2010 because the Democratic base will have been demoralized by the grand bailout of the murder-by-spreadsheet industry without a strong, robust public option in the final package.

Read it all. Then ACT.