Progressives zero in on Jim Cooper

He’s been slow to pay his party dues. He voted against Nancy Pelosi for speaker. He was the lone Democrat to vote against $50.7 billion in Hurricane Sandy relief earlier in the week and is a little too willing to work across party lines.

Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper is beginning to raise eyebrows on the left, where there’s growing chatter about taking him down in a Democratic primary.

In the aftermath of his Sandy aid vote, at least in the eyes of some progressives, the respected Blue Dog leader looks like a “deficit peacock” rather than a budget hawk.

From Steve Singiser, polling analyst for the influential progressive website Daily Kos:

Cooper, of course, has been an apostate and an irritant for quite some time. Indeed, he's been this way for decades now. I cannot begin to speculate on Cooper's motives here, besides him simply being a deficit peacock. Part of me wonders if this all traces back to his humiliating 1994 Senate defeat (when he hosed Bill Clinton on health care to defend his right flank and raise campaign cash, and subsequently lost to Republican Fred Thompson by 21 points). One has to wonder if, in Cooper's mind, it's always 1994, and the key to electoral survival is parroting Republican talking points. In the end, it doesn't matter. There were many Democrats serving much more conservative districts who voted the right way. Hell, there were over a half dozen Democrats running in districts that favored Mitt Romney who voted "yea," for crying out loud. With this vote, to say nothing of the others, Cooper has more than earned a legitimate challenge to the Democratic nomination in what is, at the end of the day, a blue seat in Congress.

Singiser isn’t the only one who’d like to see Cooper get a comeuppance. One day earlier, Daily Kos political director David Nir ripped the veteran Nashville-area congressman — one of just two Democrats left in the Tennessee delegation — as a hypocrite for voting against Sandy aid after pursuing emergency relief for his own city a few years earlier.

Cooper’s statement after the vote — “I hate voting with Republicans” — drew Nir’s ire. “Nothing could be further from the truth, though. Cooper, throughout his career, has made a point of siding with Republicans against major Democratic initiatives,” he wrote.

If nothing else, Cooper, who voted for earlier legislation that provided nearly $10 billion for federal flood insurance, has remained consistent with his philosophy on spending. There isn’t much hard evidence yet of deep Democratic unrest in his district, but it’s worth remembering the progressive Netroots have a capacity for online fundraising that could easily prop up a primary challenger — and no love for the increasingly isolated Blue Dogs.