Nancy Pelosi Is Good at Her Job and She Should Keep It.

[DonViejo]

By Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait

March 16, 2018
11:50 am

-snip-

The challenge to Pelosi has one good reason behind it, and many bad ones. The good reason is that Republicans have made her their most effective campaign message. Democrats running in red seats have faced ceaseless ads tying them to the dreaded San Francisco Liberal, and victorious candidate Conor Lamb had to disavow her leadership in order to squeak through. That’s not a replicable pattern: A handful of the party’s most vulnerable candidates might be able to promise not to support her speakership, but Democrats cannot control the chamber without candidates in 218 districts who will vote for Pelosi.

Would a different Democratic leader prove less of a liability? Probably for a while, yes. Republicans have spent years building up Pelosi as a hate figure, and a newer and less familiar Democratic leader would take longer for Republicans to promote as a target of fear and loathing. It’s also possible that a Democrat who was either from a less famously progressive locale than San Francisco, or not female, would be less threatening to some socially conservative voters. (The latter point is the most fraught: Do Democrats really want to let irrational fear of powerful women dictate their choice of leaders?) It is true, though, that deposing Pelosi would have at least a temporary messaging benefit in some tough districts this fall.

But the cost of throwing Pelosi over the side would be high. She has been an extraordinarily effective caucus leader. When Democrats last held the majority, she shepherded into law the most aggressive spate of liberal reforms since the Great Society: an $800 billion fiscal stimulus, health-care reform, Dodd-Frank. The House passed a cap and trade law at a time when bipartisan support for the idea still had some life in the Senate.

It might seem tempting to dismiss these feats as automatic, the baseline expectation for what a leader can do when her party commands a majority. It is not. During many of these fights, Democrats were wandering off in multiple directions, as Democrats are wont to do. In particular, after Republican Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts in January 2010, many if not most Democrats collapsed into despair. Pelosi kept her nerve, talked her party off the ledge, and passed a bill that was signed into law.

more
https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/nancy-pelosi-is-good-at-her-job-and-she-should-keep-it.html

[thbobby]

1. She is subject of RW hate campaign

Just like Clintons were for years. If hate campaigns are successful, they will continue in greater numbers. Of course, Nancy Pelosi should keep her job. She is damn good.

[Mc Mike]

2. Yep. Fantastic. I back her 100%. rec, nt

[ffr]

3. Damn straight!

Link to tweet

[mcar]

4. She is a great leader!

Shame on those who speak so negatively about her.

[Cha]

8. Nancy is such an effective

leader that the repubs have been doing this for over a decade...

Conor Lamb found a way around it.. I'm thinking Nancy doesn't mind...

Link to tweet

mcar

[MBS]

5. I agree completely.

And one aspect of Pelosi's life that people always forget: Although she's lived in San Francisco for decades, she grew up steeped in the smoke-filled-room-type Democratic politics of Baltimore. "San Francisco Liberal" only addresses one dimension of her deep and broad set of experiences, skills, and outlook. I think that we're very lucky to have someone around as savvy as she is to help get us out of this morass.

[Tarheel_Dem]

6. I support Nancy as long as she wants the job. Should she decide to step aside, I'm okay with that..

as well. But, I don't EVER want to hear that she's been forced out. Pelosi, Feinstein and Gillibrand have become regular targets of a very sinister group "within the party", and I use that phrase lightly. I am so tired of that crap. The same group got rid of DWS, and they're still at it.

[EffieBlack]

7. But she's so OLD!

[Gothmog]

9. Agreed

[Gothmog]

10. Nancy Pelosi doesn't care if you hate her

I also like this article http://theweek.com/articles/761142/nancy-pelosi-doesnt-care-hate

Nancy Pelosi welcomes your hatred.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration. But when the Republican Party spends so much of its time talking about her, you'd think she'd be a bit more perturbed. And there's no sign she is.

She has good reason. We just saw yet another election in which Republicans tried everything they could do to tie the Democratic candidate to Pelosi, and he won anyway. Conor Lamb, the victor in that Pennsylvania special election, said at the campaign's outset that he wouldn't be voting for Pelosi for speaker in 2019 if he were elected, since he thought the time had come for a new generation to take control (Pelosi, who's 77, has been in Congress for over 30 years). That might not have made Pelosi feel good, but she's as hard-headed as they come, and if it helped win a seat for Democrats, she wasn't going to complain.

But we don't know whether it actually did help. Perhaps Lamb's stance defused the attack (though it certainly didn't stop Republicans from making it), or perhaps when people are voting for their member of Congress, they don't much care who the party's leader is.

That sounds like a radical thing to say, but the truth is that we have zero evidence that it actually changes any votes when every Republican candidate shouts "My opponent is just a puppet of San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi!" There's no question that Republican voters dislike her, but that's very different from her actually having an effect on the outcome of any race. But we've been seeing those ads for so long we just assume they must make a difference