Thirty-nine House Democrats voted against health care reform; 27 of them lost. House Democrats who distanced themselves from the party by bashing Nancy Pelosi almost all lost. Almost every House Democrat who voted against unemployment benefit extensions lost.

All of these groups strongly correlate with Blue Dogs.

In addition to education, another area where you can see the President and the Republicans in Congress agreeing is on the issue of trade. One of the first international figures Obama talked to on Election Day was the President of South Korea, and he assured him that the US was working on passing a free trade agreement between the two countries.

Obama and a few Republicans may agree, but I’d be hard-pressed to find any Democrats to join them, including the Blue Dogs. For all his obvious faults, Heath Shuler is a fair trader. So was the majority of the 111th House of Representatives, as evidenced by the vote on the Chinese currency bill, which had the support of 99 Republicans, most of whom remain in the House. A new report from Public Citizen shows that 205 Democratic and Republican candidates used fair trade and anti-outsourcing messaging in their election campaigns. Only 37 candidates campaigned as pro-NAFTA free traders, and half of them lost.

“That Democrats and GOP alike ran against the trade policy status quo highlights the intensity of public ire about our job exporting trade policy – a phenomenon also seen in national polls. It also reveals the trouble that the White House and GOP leaders will face if they try to pass the leftover Bush trade pacts with Korea, Colombia and Panama, to say nothing of the threat such a move would cause to President Obama’s reelection in 2012,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Freshmen GOP congressmen being asked by their leadership to support trade agreements most Americans consider job-killers undoubtedly will have the foreseeable 2012 Democratic attack ads in mind.”

Democrats picked up three seats from Republicans, making good on some prior anomalies and realigning correctly. Colleen Hanabusa (HI-01), Cedric Richmond (LA-02) and John Carney (DE-AL) all won. Of those, I would say Hanabusa and Richmond will join the Progressive Caucus. In AL-07, Terri Sewell replaced Artur Davis. She’s a lot more progressive than he ever was, and she will likely join the caucus. David Cicilline (RI-01), the replacement for Patrick Kennedy and another openly gay member of Congress, is likely to join (Patrick Kennedy never did). The race that a progressive lost in a primary, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (MI-13), was over ethical issues, and she’ll be replaced by Hansen Clarke, likely to join the caucus.

What’s likely, then, is an increase in the ranks of the Progressive Caucus numbers. Even if they opened the floodgates on the Blue Dog Caucus, which they limit, they won’t increase their numbers.

Thanks to those very same conservatives, this entire country now resembles nothing so much as their stereotype of a loser writ large.

The Blue Dogs and conservadems engineered their own electoral demise by putting their “fiscal conservatism” ahead of the wellbeing of their constituents and the country as a whole.

The Democrats are going to lose big this fall, especially in the House. I don’t think anyone is disputing this. What is worth debating is why we’re going to see such a dramatic reversal of the gains that were won in 2006 and 2008.

Lucky for the country, the Democrats control the Senate and the House. Otherwise, all kinds of bad stuff would be happening — like extending the Bush tax cuts.

Without consulting the progressives who voted her in as Speaker, Nancy Pelosi joined the Blue Dogs to come up with a brilliant plan to pass a rule saying they had passed a budget without actually troubling themselves to do so.

“The very rich are different from you and me.” Yes, and that’s why their representatives on the Catfood Commission are horrified that their fellow commissioner Alan Simpson was so indiscreet as to reveal what they think of most Americans: Namely, that we’re “lesser” than them.

We now know about the failure of the top kill in the Gulf, ensuring the continued gusher of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for at least the near future. Almost nobody in America knows about the “bottom kill” pulled off by the House of Representatives late on Friday.