Alabama Democrat Toes the G.O.P. Line

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.

If that is true, Mr. Bright recently became Alabama’s sole test case.

On Dec. 22, Representative Parker Griffith, a freshman representing the northernmost district in the state, announced that he was switching to the Republican Party. His defection was a bad sign for Democratic hopes of retaining seats in the South, specifically in Alabama, which has moved ever more securely into the Republican column since the mid-1960s, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 permanently altered Southern politics.

Gratitude still abides in Mr. Griffith’s district for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is one reason voters there have not sent a Republican to Congress for over 140 years. Mr. Griffith’s calculation that he probably could not win as a Democrat indicates that the hostile reaction to Democrats over the past year has been intense enough to turn an already deeply red state — one that President Obama lost by more than 20 percentage points in 2008 — even redder.

And it leaves, standing alone as the sole white conservative Democrat in the state’s Congressional delegation, Mr. Bright, 57, who represents the men in Church’s Chicken. Mr. Bright has announced no plans to switch parties. If one counted only by his voting record, it would not seem to make a difference anyhow.

“Bright and Parker won, despite the poor showing of Obama, because they are conservative and therefore not open to attack from Republicans on social issues like abortion, prayer, guns and taxes,” John Anzalone, a Montgomery-based Democratic pollster, wrote in an e-mail message.

Mr. Anzalone argued that Mr. Griffith’s calculation was likely to end up hurting him, since he now has to face a Republican primary, while Mr. Bright’s conservative record could potentially expand his base.

Mr. Bright’s victory in 2008, the first by a Democrat in this district for nearly 45 years, was something of a fluke. He is uniquely qualified: a former mayor of Montgomery, he was popular in the largely black areas in his district that are near the city. But he was born the 13th child of a poor sharecropper in the quiet country to the south, a largely white region of peanut farms and cotton fields known as the Wiregrass. The area is deeply conservative, but it likes its own, and Mr. Bright is one of them.

The huge turnout by black voters in the 2008 election, coupled with some infighting on the Republican side, resulted in Mr. Bright’s winning the Second District by less than 1 percentage point.

Since winning, Mr. Bright has been such a purebred Blue Dog that he is practically red. He has voted with the Republicans on every significant piece of legislation of his term, including the health care overhaul, the budget and the “cap and trade” energy legislation. The reaction to his rare party-line votes helps explain why: a largely pro forma vote to keep Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House has drawn the ire of some of his supporters.