ANDALUSIA, Ala.  Among the men who gather every morning at 6 o’clock at the Church’s Chicken here on Three Notch Street, there is general agreement that the Obama administration is doing a very bad job of running the country. And the stakes are as high, as one coffee drinker put it, as the survival of the country’s culture, economy and way of life.

Yet this group is represented in the House by a Democrat, Bobby Bright. And they are actually fond of him. For now.

“I like Bobby,” said Glenn Cook, 72, a retired electrical engineer. “I think he’s a great guy and a fine Christian man. But when he first came out, I wished that he’d been a Republican.”

In the deep-red states of the South, it is very hard these days to be a Blue Dog, as members of the group of 52 centrist House Democrats are known. Suspicions about the Obama administration’s expansive view of government power have made the Democratic label so toxic in some parts of the South that merely voting like a Republican  as many Blue Dogs do  may no longer be enough.