Nice doggy.

Nothing better illustrates the debunking of conventional wisdom with respect to the ’06 mid-terms and the similar conventional wisdom with respect to Republican Party ideology than health care reform which is currently stalled in committee.

The popular myth of the ’06 midterms is that the G.O.P. had moved too far to the right 3 quarters of the way through George Bush’s time in office and which resulted in the Republicans surrendering control of the House and Senate. Of course, nothing could’ve been further from the truth as the Democrats, shrewdly ran fiscally conservative and often pro-war candidates in once-safe Republican districts. Candidates who sounded and acted like Republicans used to sound and act.

But just as a straying from conservative principles bit the Republicans in the rear end, the Democrats are reaping the reward now for their cynical electoral calculations. The Democrats don’t have the floor votes for their health care reform because of the Blue Dog coalition, a band of 52 fiscally conservative Democrats who have seen their numbers and influence increase as a result of the ’06 and ’08 elections.

As it stands currently, as concessions to the Blue Dogs in the House Energy and Commerce committee, two of the center pieces of the health care reform bill, the public option and the employer mandatory coverage look to be all but dropped from the bill completely.

The hard lesson of the G.O.P.’s profligate spending, particularly in Bush’s second term is now realized that with solid Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate and with a hyper-active, crisis-capitalizing Democratic Presidential administration, they are responsible for 2 horrible pieces of legislation (3, counting porkulus) that will probably, in some shape or form, be levied against the American public.

And any amount of positive concessions and/or watering down of cap and trade and health care reform to make them both as benign as possible can be attributed to, in no small part, a group of (D)s that stayed right and showed the backbone that a large number of Bush (R)s never did.

That Obama’s agenda might get derailed because the Democratic party swerved too far to the right.

H/T: Politico