Bloomberg’s Christopher Stern speaks a truth that’s been obvious to those who’ve been paying attention — namely, that the Blue Dogs, who pitch themselves as the Enemies of Pork, have their snouts buried deeply in the Federal trough:

U.S. Representative Jim Marshall is a Georgia Democrat and a member of his party’s Blue Dog Coalition, a group of lawmakers bound by a desire to restrain federal spending. The Blue Dogs have something else in common: a fondness for funding pet projects.

Marshall alone requested more than $12 billion worth of the so-called earmarks in the 2010 federal budget. His proposals range from $388,850 to aid 14 local farmers’ markets to $4.2 billion to purchase C-17 heavy-lift transport aircraft.

Overall, Blue Dogs submitted more than 2,500 individual earmarks totaling some $20 billion. That underscores the conflict between their eagerness to bring federal money home and the coalition’s criticism of the budget as laden with pork.

“It’s really hard to smack government’s wrists with the one hand while the other hand is looking for as much earmark cash as you can grab and bring home to your district,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based public-interest group.

Okay then, so if the Blue Dogs are really not all about fiscal prudence — or at least their own fiscal prudence — what are they about?

Howie Klein offered up a big fat hint late last month, when discussing those Democrats with a fetish for voting against hate crimes bills: Every single one of the seventeen alleged Democrats voting against the 2009 hate crimes bill was a Blue Dog. Furthemore, all but three — Bobby Bright, Travis Childers, and John Tanner — of the Blue Doggies who voted against the 2009 bill had also voted against the 2007 hate crimes bill (and very likely the only reason Bright and Childers didn’t in 2007 is simply because they weren’t in Congress yet)! The repeat offenders include key Blue Dog leaders like Heath Schuler, their Whip, and Charlie Melancon, their Communications Director.

Another big hint can be seen in the geographic distribution of the Blue Dogs. They are heavily weighted towards Southern and rural or exurban white-flight megachurch districts. They loves them some pork, as long as it all goes to white people. Now, do recall the long-ago words of a certain Lee Atwater, in discussing how the tax-hating Chamber of Commerces and other moneyed interests that bankroll the GOP decided to wed the racist vote by use of the "Southern Strategy", a big part of which involved attacking Big Government (and the taxes that fund it) in general, and anything that might help nonwhites in particular:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can’t say "nigger" – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

In other words, it’s not exactly a coincidence that of the fifty-odd persons that make up the Blue Dog Coalition, only one (Georgia’s David Scott) is black and only six are Hispanics.

The bottom line is that the majority of the Blue Dogs, particularly those in leadership slots, are the spiritual heirs of the old Southern Dixiecrats whose opposition to anything that might help blacks — especially Southern blacks — forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to curtail a big chunk of the New Deal. It wasn’t until LBJ and his Great Society that the long-delayed civil rights portion of the New Deal was finally enacted — and the end result was giving the Republicans the opening they needed to do a full-scale implementation of the Southern Strategy that led the Dixiecrats straight into the Republican Party.

Related posts:

1. Blue Dogs Win Big for Health Insurance Industry; Public Option Now Less Robust
2. Blue Dogs Can’t Find a Bone? PAC Donations Plummet
3. Attention Blue Dogs: It’s Not 1994
4. Waxman: Blue Dogs Trying to “Eviscerate” Health Care
5. Come Saturday Morning: The Blue Dogs That Won’t Hunt Together