Since House “Blue Dog” Democrats might actually save the nation from financial ruin ---by nixing or dramatically altering Obamacare and Ecocapitalism---it behooves us to review the historic origins of this august group of conservative Democrats.

Conservative Democrats?

The context of Blue Doggism is complex; please bear with me, for politics makes strange bedfellows.

Before the Civil War, it was Democrats, not Whig/Republicans, who favored states’ right and fiscal conservatism. Moreover, in the decades immediately following the Civil War, both political parties developed “liberal” and “conservative” wings. Today’s Blue Dogs are descendants of Democrat conservatives (on the Republican side, John McCain, for example, descends from progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, Early Warren, and Nelson Rockefeller).

After the Civil War, Democrats began a century-long effort to cleanse their party of the stain of its pro-slavery origins. In the South, “Redeemer” Democrats reluctantly accepted Emancipation while simultaneously ousting Republican African Americans and white GOP leaders; they “redeemed” the South by enacting Jim Crow segregation laws. Fiscally conservative, militant, and staunchly loyal, the “Solid South” became a key to national Democrat resurgence.

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This editorial will appear in tomorrow's print edition.

In case you missed it, Washington just flunked the test for school reform.

The failure will sting. States that pass the test are eligible for a piece of $4.35 billion in federal education funding. It looks like Washington’s schools aren’t even in the running.

The money is part of an initiative called “Race to the Top.” Congress and President Barack Obama have charged Education Secretary Arne Duncan (see his commentary on the opposite page) with disbursing it to states that can serve as showcases for what works in public education.

Obama and Duncan told the country Friday how they planned to identify those states. Essentially, a state would have to demonstrate that it can implement successful, student-focused reforms in the face of political obstacles, hidebound K-12 establishments and teachers unions.

Some of their core expectations:

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Bluntness is one of Tacoma City Councilwoman Julie Anderson's virtues (or vices, perhaps, if you're on the receiving end).

This morning, Sound Transit officials led a small crowd on a walking tour of the route on which it will build Sounder tracks from Freighthouse Square to Pacific Avenue in Tacoma.

It was one of those "public process" events. Most of the people there were Dome district advocates who oppose the agency's plan to put the tracks atop a berm instead of the post-and-beam design they favor.

The engineering on the berm is mostly done. The agency has already decided that the post-and-beam structure wouldn't work as well (at least for its own purposes) and would be more expensive.

Still, the people associated with that decision – Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl and Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy, among others – were conciliatory as could be. They left the distinct impression that they were going to hear everyone out and take everything into consideration. Which is not the same thing as saying anything's going to change.

But Anderson – a member of the Sound Transit board and now a candidate for county auditor – told me the issue is ancient history. "It's unfortunate that people think we're at a decision point, because a decision was made quite some time ago."

There's something to be said for not getting people's hopes up.

They are going to write about us you know.

Someday, in the distant future, books will be written and movies will be made about we the people who lived in the time of the Great Recession. I’m talking “Grapes of Wrath” like stories only instead of traveling across country looking for work in a run down double decker go cart, the people of our time will be symbolized by a picture of a single mother sitting in an emergency room with a crying three year old on her lap and a bored six year old at her side.

Cinematically speaking, a “Grapes of Wrath” sojourn from Oklahoma to California has a far more dramatic effect than a woman in an Emergency Room leafing through a year old edition of People Magazine, but that is our current cross to bear in the year 2009, a health care system that is really no system at all, a lopsided wasteful land where some people gorge and others starve.

I can almost hear the future movie pitches now, and yes there are two rolling around in my skull because as of yet we don’t know which one will win out. We don’t know which version will be part of the great American narrative. Will it be the struggle conservatives have to keep health care embedded in a free market system, a fight to keep an encroaching government out of a business in which they don’t belong, or will it be the liberal struggle, a story of a one hundred year old uphill climb that began with Teddy Roosevelt’s presidential platform and finally succeeded with President Barack Obama?

Here’s the fun part:

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