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TOPIC: "Pelosi, Undone by Her Own Success" (11/5/2010)


Diamond

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"Pelosi, Undone by Her Own Success" (11/5/2010)
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I admit it, this article really surprised me. This is definitely not the image of Nancy Pelosi that I have received from the media... and Eugene Robinson's words, I'd go with.

Read @ RCP
(Emphasis added)

Pelosi, Undone by Her Own Success

By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON -- Losing elections is an occupational hazard for politicians, so there's no need to get all weepy about the Democratic officeholders who suddenly find themselves with more time to spend with their families. It would be more appropriate to shed a tear or two for the future of the country, what with the tea party brigade coming to town. Then again, I was pretty gloomy after the 1994 midterms and yet it turned out that the world did not actually end.

President Obama still has the ability to set the nation's agenda -- and also the power of the veto, in case of emergency. Harry Reid is still Senate majority leader -- and after the way he punched and scrapped his way to victory, who wants to mess with him? As for John Boehner, he'll soon learn that his new job requires a more extensive vocabulary than "no."

But amid the wreckage of Tuesday's GOP rampage, there's one person for whom I feel awful: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She's losing her job not because she does it poorly but because she does it so well. (Emphasis added)

Pelosi would never ask for, or even accept, my sympathy -- that's not her style. Her place in history was secure the moment she became the first woman to take possession of the speaker's gavel. Still, she squeezed every drop out of her four-year tenure. To string together a couple of sports cliches, she came to play and she left it all on the field.

I regret that the nation has never come to know the actual Nancy Pelosi. Most Americans are probably familiar only with the caricature that her political opponents sketched -- the effete "San Francisco liberal" who knew nothing of America outside her mink-lined cocoon, where the taps ran with Chablis and nourishment consisted of unpronounceable French cheeses, served up on silver platters by waiters who were certainly gay, and quite possibly married.

That's not the Nancy Pelosi known to anyone who has ever met her. While the term "San Francisco liberal" is accurate, it's also true that she grew up -- and learned the rough-and-tumble of politics -- in gritty Baltimore. Her father, Tommy D'Alesandro, was a legendary "Charm City" mayor and political boss. Her education in how to count votes, and keep them counted, began at a young age.

When she appears before the cameras, Pelosi often seems stiff and almost brittle. In person, she's warm and engaging -- also funny, earthy, and just plain good company. She tells a great story. She turns a mean phrase. Colleagues on Capitol Hill almost universally describe her as a good boss and simply a good person.

It was frustrating to hear Republicans demonize her in their thunderous public statements, then confess privately that they really liked her. Ain't politics grand?

And demonize her they did. In their midterm campaign, Republicans attacked Pelosi more often, and more brutally, than they attacked Obama. They made her the living embodiment of Evil Washington, or of limousine socialism, or of whatever alleged plagues that Democrats were supposedly visiting upon the body politic.

The GOP was only able to make Pelosi an issue because she was so effective as speaker. Obama came to office with a long, ambitious agenda. Pelosi had a big majority to work with in the House, but it was ideologically diverse -- Blue Dogs, progressives, everything in between. Somehow, she managed to deliver.

Some of the votes she won looked impossible. On health care reform, there appeared to be no way the House could ever be persuaded to pass the more conservative bill that had passed the Senate. At one point, she told me she could only find "maybe a dozen votes" for the measure. But she and Reid managed to find a workable set of modifications -- and a clever parliamentary maneuver to pull the whole thing off.

I was at the Capitol that day when the House passed the landmark health care bill. Tea party groups were protesting outside, egged on by Republican members of Congress who came out onto a balcony and led the catcalls.

Pelosi did what was right for the country, and what's right isn't always what's popular. Democrats may decide they need a less-polarizing figure as minority leader; if they do, well, that's politics. But I'd love to see her stay in the Democratic leadership -- and I'm betting that eventually she'd find a way to take back the gavel that she pounds with such righteous authority.

Lin to RCP
======================

May be it is time to step back and think whether we have been taken for a grand ride by the Grand Old Party.

The GOP was only able to make Pelosi an issue because she was so effective ....

That pretty much what I said about what GOP did to Hillary when she was the First Lady trying to pitch in on Pres.Clinton's policy agenda.

It is true  that from the viewpoint of the POTUS's agenda, she managed to deliver.  The one thing that I did not like there is the huge penalty that was built into the mandate in the House version of the Health care reform - and I really have to wonder where that came from as I cannot imagine democrats putting in jail time.  I just cannot overlook that in thinking about Pelosi.  But we dont always know where pieces of the legislation come from and end up on the table.

Eugene Robinson does not write like this unless we HAVE TO sit up and take notice of something...  There have been so many articlces and so many advertisements that we may have ourselves fallen into the trap - this concerns me. 

Here are Eugene Robinson's other articles at RCP.  Worth reading. He is a good thinker, and is very fair in his assessments and writings.

I especially liked this part of the above article:
John Boehner, he'll soon learn that his new job requires a more extensive vocabulary than "no."


-- Edited by Sanders on Friday 5th of November 2010 04:55:29 PM

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Democracy needs defending - SOS Hillary Clinton, Sept 8, 2010
Democracy is more than just elections - SOS Hillary Clinton, Oct 28, 2010

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Platinum

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Bottom line is Pelosi did what was best...ie: historic....for her party at the cost of what the nation needed first and foremost, jobs.  Hillary NEVER would have wasted her first 18 months on healthcare knowing how the economy was priority 1.

They way Pelosi got healthcare passed proved to the electorate that there was going to be NO CHANGE in how Washington did business.  Game the same, only the gender was changed.

The electorate decided to give the Repubs a try at doing what the voters wanted accomplished rather than simply what their party wants.

Stay tuned the next two years to see if THEY actually heard the voters or they also will misread their "mandate" the way the Dems have for the last two years.

And for the record, I will NEVER forgive her for the way she tried to "bait" the healthcare protestors by marching with her gavel surrounded by video camera armed companions in an effort to cause a scene instead of using the same underground House tunnel she usually uses.

I found that a disgraceful display of arrogance at a most inapportune time and apparently from the voting this week, so did most of the electorate.

-- Edited by VotedHillary on Friday 5th of November 2010 11:54:46 PM

-- Edited by VotedHillary on Friday 5th of November 2010 11:57:09 PM

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Moderator

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I could never respect Nancy P. after she bribed and intimidated super delegates to support Barack at the Dem convention. She was one of the UN-democratic, Democrat Coalition in 2008. Along with Howard Dean and other Dem leaders Pelosi worked to circumvent the will of the voters, and impose her own. In participating in the theft of the nomination for Barack, she not only helped damage the party, possibly beyond repair, she helped damage the country by placing an empty suit in charge.

Again, she demonstrated total disregard of the will of the people - pushing HCR through, in spite of the fact that the country didn't want it. She wanted to do the will of Barack and to build her own legacy. Politics came first - not the needs of the country.

No doubt she represents her own district and its ideology very well. Perhaps her talent and legendary tenacity would be of better and more appropriate use in the CA State Legislature. She's done too much damage at the national level, imo, and for that, deserves little respect.

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Platinum

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Nancy Pelosi was not undone by her own sucess but by her belief that the end justified the means. She thought she knew what was best for us because we were too uneducated and ignorant to know what was best for us. And she still thinks we are too unsophisticated and dumb and illiterate to know what we need. Its her supreme arrogance that did her in. She all by herself started a little class warfare game here, Hillary Dems were the "uneducated", Obama's were the intellectuals. That was her doing. She is a classic divide and conquer Democrat, and no we don't need her as leader. We do need a unifier. No one in power now fits that bill.

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Diamond

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Yes, She gets no break for what she did to Hillary. It was all wrong.

As to unifier, Eugene is projecting her as unifier on the Dem side - that part I had missed before.

It appears that pubs flat out refused to do anything. So, was there ever a chance to unify. They started on the war path in January before the POTUS was inaugurated - and that's what has been confirmed now.

I also do not like it that the bill in the House had very heavy penalties; I much preferred the Senate version on the penalties. But I preferred that the House version had at least one public option built in as safety net - of course that did not pass.

Yes, we do need a unifier and someone willing to work with the other side.

Meanwhile, I truly hope both sides learn to work together in the coming weeks before they have to flip sides.

__________________
Democracy needs defending - SOS Hillary Clinton, Sept 8, 2010
Democracy is more than just elections - SOS Hillary Clinton, Oct 28, 2010

Madam Secretary Blog at ForeignPolicy.com
Project Vote Smart - Stay informed and engaged!


Diamond

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Nancy Pelosi's proven record as Democratic leader
(Washington Post, 11/10/10)

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

A lot of Democrats deserve a share of the blame for the shellacking they took last week, beginning with a president who shied away from defending his achievements. Nancy Pelosi, however, should not be high on that list.

[SNIP]

The House passed other, separate job-creating bills that went nowhere in the Senate, including tax credits for retrofitting homes and the extension of a program of low-interest bonds to build schools and roads. Whatever Pelosi's sins may be, they don't include fiddling while the economy burned. As the most effective speaker in modern American history, she not only led the House to enact the landmark legislation on the to-do list of her party and president - health-care reform, financial reform, a cap-and-trade bill to reduce global warming - but also returned repeatedly to measures that would help the economy. Unlike the Senate, the House, under Pelosi, could walk and chew gum at the same time.

Were there Blue Dogs whom she forced to vote for measures that went on to doom them electorally? Actually, her practice was to let those members vote their districts - that is, oppose controversial bills - once majority support was assured. Is she out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans? On several issues over her career, she's been the leading tribune for causes that turned out to be not only right but popular. We should remember that Pelosi, opposing then-Democratic leader Richard Gephardt, led the opposition to the resolution authorizing the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq and that her long-standing concern for Chinese human rights led her to oppose normalizing trade with China.

You can argue, of course, that all this and a couple of bucks entitle her to a ride on the D.C. Metro. Neither she nor Harry Reid are capable public speakers, but the great Democratic mystery is whatever happened to Barack Obama, who once was supremely capable of arguing the case for fundamental, complex change. She is - Oh, the Horror - from San Francisco. Yet she remains the Democrat most capable of forging a unified opposition to Republican attempts to undercut key programs such as Social Security and Medicaid, and her record demonstrates that she is the Democrats' most effective fighter for the interests of ordinary Americans. That's not the perception, alas, but it's the reality - which Democrats ignore at their peril.

======================

Very interesting.    I do recall that she was the most prominent asking for some relief for "Main street" - and she was most vocal about it.  Some of this other info is relatively new to me.  I wonder why the Senate posed so much opposition to jobs bills!

-- Edited by Sanders on Wednesday 10th of November 2010 07:43:38 PM

__________________
Democracy needs defending - SOS Hillary Clinton, Sept 8, 2010
Democracy is more than just elections - SOS Hillary Clinton, Oct 28, 2010

Madam Secretary Blog at ForeignPolicy.com
Project Vote Smart - Stay informed and engaged!
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