Who Are the Blue Dogs?

By Michael Tomasky

A crucial fact about today's Congress, and one that even many politically astute observers may not fully appreciate, rests in the vast ideological differences between the two congressional parties. I don't mean by this that the Democrats have become uniformly liberal and the Republicans uniformly conservative, which is the standard grievance issued by the press, but rather that only the latter has happened—and that it has happened with surprising speed.

Consider, for example, a comparison of the makeup of the House of Representatives today versus twenty years ago, looking at the 101st Congress (1989–1990) and the current 111th Congress. The parties' numbers of seats in both congresses is about the same: the Democrats had a 261–174 advantage in 1989 and enjoy a 258–177 margin today. But the changes in how each party got to those numbers reveals a great deal.