Scarborough on Pelosi

[JHan]

80. Except in the case of Nancy it is not normal..

Gephardt ( for example ) faced neither the same expectations nor demonization as Pelosi - I am very interested in this disparity.

I often quote this piece because it expresses far better than I ever could the dynamics I'm seeing - and if we want to talk advocacy this is where MY advocacy comes in as a young woman and why I challenge the narratives, whether it's HRC or Pelosi:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/

Why so much discontent with a woman who has proved so good at her job? Maybe because many Democrats think Pelosi’s unpopularity undermines their chances of winning back the House. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians usually are. Therein lies the tragedy. Nancy Pelosi does her job about as well as anyone could. But because she’s a woman, she may not be doing it well enough.

Within days of pelosi’s ascension to House minority leader, in 2003, back when nearly 60 percent of Americans still had no idea who she was, the Republican Party featured her visage—“garish and twisted,” in the words of a magazine article at the time—in an ad against a Democrat running for Congress in Louisiana. The GOP has been using her as a scarecrow ever since. Before the 2010 midterms, the National Republican Congressional Committee cited Pelosi in an astonishing 70 percent of its ads—far more than the percentage that cited Obama. And for good reason: Internal Republican polling showed that Pelosi was far less popular than the president. After Democrats lost their House majority that fall, Congressman Allen Boyd of Florida, whose reelection bid failed, called hers “the face that defeated us in this last election.”

In the run-up to the 2012 elections, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, Republicans invoked Pelosi in television ads seven times as often as they invoked the Senate’s Democratic leader, Harry Reid. Four years after that, in the run-up to 2016, they invoked her three times as often.

*snip*

The Democrats who want Pelosi gone don’t deny her talent. But they say her unpopularity is too heavy a load to bear. “The Republican playbook for the past four election cycles has been very focused, very clear,” Representative Kathleen Rice, a Democrat from New York, insisted after Ossoff’s defeat. “It’s been an attack on our leader. Is it fair? No. Are the attacks accurate? No. But guess what? They work.” Nonpartisan observers agree. As David Wasserman, an editor of “The Cook Political Report,” tweeted after the Georgia loss, “It’s just extremely difficult for Ds to argue benefits of Nancy Pelosi’s fundraising skills still outweigh cost of her presence in GOP ads.”

Not everyone agrees that Pelosi’s unpopularity is a function of gender. Some observers note that her Republican counterpart, Speaker Paul Ryan, is unpopular too: According to HuffPost’s poll aggregator, Americans disapprove of both Ryan and Pelosi by 20 percentage points. But Ryan’s unpopularity tracks his party’s, which Americans disapprove of by 23 points—whereas Pelosi’s disapproval margin is almost twice that of the Democratic Party as a whole. Others chalk up Pelosi’s image problems to her ideology (liberal) and home base (San Francisco). But Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a liberal from Brooklyn, has a disapproval margin half as large as hers.

And this right here:

As the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2015 paper, Americans generally believe “that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such as competitiveness, self-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness.” But “these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality.” In fact, “the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness.”

The more successful Pelosi is—the more she outmaneuvers and dominates her male adversaries—the more threatening she becomes. And the easier it becomes to tar the male Democratic candidates who would serve under her as emasculated yes-men.

It would be comforting to think that Pelosi is alienating because she’s a rich liberal Democrat from San Francisco—not because she’s a woman. Yet despite attributes that should make her endearing to cultural conservatives—she is a Catholic Italian American grandmother of nine who entered politics only after staying home to raise her kids—many Americans greeted her rise with, in the words of the Yale researchers, “contempt, anger, and/or disgust.” It was the same for Hillary Clinton: Her deep religiosity, career-long focus on child welfare, and insistence on keeping her family together in the face of near-unimaginable humiliation didn’t spare her in the 2016 presidential election.

Similarly, if Senator Elizabeth Warren seeks the presidency, she won’t be able to count on help from her working-class Oklahoma roots and anti–Wall Street passion. On the surface, Trump’s “Pocahontas” slur may appear as unrelated to gender as Clinton’s emails did. But the moral outrage that female ambition provokes takes many forms. Already, notes Jennifer Lawless, who directs the Women and Politics Institute at American University, Republicans target Warren far more often than they target her populist doppelgänger, Senator Bernie Sanders. Not coincidentally, according to HuffPost, Americans approve of Sanders by a margin of 24 points—and of Warren by only four points.

A woman will one day make it to the White House. Nancy Pelosi may again become the speaker. But her experience offers an irony and a warning: For women politicians to succeed, they must defeat and outmaneuver men. Yet the better at it they are, the more detested they become.