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Let's Argue About Nancy Pelosi
ElJeffe
Moderator, ClubPA mod
Moderator, ClubPA mod
Here is a place for everyone to argue about Nancy Pelosi, her politics, her policies, her strategery, and whatever else.
Please try to make your posts constructive. "UGH SHE'S LITERALLY THE WORST" is not considered constructive.
Please try to make your posts constructive. "UGH SHE'S LITERALLY THE WORST" is not considered constructive.
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Is there anyone who believes this is the case?
I mean maybe it turns out that she's been playing nth dimensional astral plane chess or something but we can certainly evaluate the things she's chosen to do given the options available immediately and some very distinct failures on the part of the party she's chosen to lead.
Like no one made the DNC cave completely on concentration camps, that's on her. Fighting back against anything but the most anemic oversight? That's on her. The opposition party ignoring Carroll's credible rape accusations? On her. Spending all this time and effort trying to slap down Justice Democrats? On her.
Even with rock bottom expectations the 2018 House has been a huge disappointment so far.
The differences aren't quite as large as your pretending, though.
Which differences?
Hell I even didn't frame that scale properly now that I think about it; the side opposite freedom should be "throw more children in, make conditions worse actively." She managed to find her 'centrist' middle-ground of keeping things as-is I suppose. Unfortunately the status quo is children being tortured by improper care and some of them are dying quite literally.
I think the ICE is becoming or is already the Gestapo and running concentration camps, and that armed resistance against that is justifiable. The effective leader of the Democratic party pushing the party's rhetoric down that path is a path to potential civil war.
We're not completely at the point where the Democrats can't win it back at the voting booth yet. Pelosi has the unenviable job of keeping the center-left coalition together long enough for that, with the left throwing bombs and the center still sleep walking.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Good: She voted against displaying the Bible's Ten Commandments in public buildings including schools!
Bad: She voted in favor of No Child Left Behind, goddamn it.
Good: She vocally supports the legalization of marijuana!
Bad: She actually hasn't done anything to support that effort.
Good: She likes to remove confederate monuments and has actually done so, moving a Robert E Lee statue and replacing it with Rosa Parks.
Bad: She's in favor of PRISM, a government surveillance program used by Bush and Obama.
Bad - wait what, not another good?: She originally had no problem with waterboarding done by the Bush administration after being briefed about it in excruciating detail (2002) and only changed her mind a few years later when the public found out about it and was outraged (2007). Ah, opportunism.
She is very much a human being, and frankly it's unfair to her to expect some kind of miracle play.
To keep this from simply being a colossal dunk, Pelosi doesn't understand that racists aren't interested in working to be not racist. The only person who is going to work to meet middle-ground in this situation is Pelosi; "okay, how about SOME racism, not all-out racism?" And of course the Trump administration will take that over "no racism at all." She can't even do that much.
Concentration camps are not positive. There should not be any sort of "working with" there, it should be "working against."
Ok? So she isn't doing that. You can argue that not fighting further for the House bill was a mistake (I think it was absolutely awful), but this "pelosi is absolutely gungho for 'then they came for'" is... ridiculous.
She made a mistake with the bill.
Also, she really needs to begin impeachment proceedings.
1) If she is with you, there is nobody you'd rather have whipping votes in the last 100 years or so. She is very very effective at getting what she wants out of her caucus.
2) She has been captured by the DC consultant class, which insists that voters want the Democrats to fiercely defend the status quo, otherwise swing white voters will bail. And this is the only way they can conceive of politics.
So if you have a confrontation that's going to hurt those voters (say, privatizing social security, or the government shutdown) Nancy Pelosi is exactly the person you want in charge. Or if you want to pass a moderate reform that will help a lot of them without being a radical transformation (ACA, '09 carbon tax) she will get that through. If, on the other hand, it's something that requires government policy (note: not words) to confront racism, or a fight that makes you an explicitly partisan figure (impeachment), she's not going to manage that job. She also thinks the middle is deathly afraid of the far left, so she whacks those figures even though they supported her and the moderates she caters to tried to get her replaced as Speaker.
She's just a product of being moderate and white for 6 decades who really likes "normal" even when it doesn't mean anything anymore. I'd be totally fine with her remaining in congress, but as a fixture in the Democrat apparatus she's not adapting and right now is hampering more than she is helping. I'm not willing to say she's never been good, I've never been a fan though.
Edit: I know in general thematically I am basically "Boomers get progressive or get the fuck out!" when it comes to elder politicians. I'm finding that even progressive for a boomer is rooted in the 1950's way too often.
If we're going to go that far back and not mention the work she did on the ACA (and how Lieberman screwed her) than I don't know what point you're making
This is basically the quintessential silliness of this whole affair.
Her comment is literally "Trump's comments were fucking racist. He should stop his racist comments and help us pass real immigration reform." And this is a problem because ... she wants to work with the other parts of the government that are necessary to actually reform the immigration system? This position just doesn't make sense.
The idea that she doesn't understand what she's working with here are silly. She's saying this because messaging about functioning government is effective, especially for a party that believes in effective government, and because there's literally no other options. Trump is president. As Speaker, if she were to pass immigration reform, she would have to work with Trump. So you go out there and say that. Because the alternative is just saying you aren't gonna do anything.
Nah. It's just that there's different games being played now. Ones that play less to her strengths. And also fights where, frankly, a lot of people here just don't agree with her. It's a lot easier to cheer someone on when they are supporting your position. The position she's representing, as the general consensus of the House caucus, is just not the same as that of most people here.
I would phrase this as ineffective vs. effective rather than bad vs. good. She's an ineffective Speaker for this moment, but was a effective Speaker for 2007-2011.
Yeah, people seem to forget that she has a caucus that encompasses a huge variety of constituencies.
God speed dear moderators.
In general I think the biggest problem right now is Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership seems to have decided/been convinced by strategists that the electorate does not care about oversight or opposing Trump and so they shouldn't push hard on the issue for fear of alienating voters.
I think leadership is slowly being convinced, but this seems to be a big issue, yes.
I think this (LATimes reporter) has a lot to say on why leadership is the way it is
Edit - And done. Everyone read that right now, it should be the OP imo.
The quote is basically dead on. The younger members, not just of the House but of the polity in general imo, have grown up in a era when the right-wing has never been anything but obviously a bunch of idiots and racists who have no interest in even acknowledging the legitimacy of the opposition or dealing with them in good faith. The older members of the party, whether in leadership or not, are generally too attached to ideas about how to deal with the GOP that don't make sense now if they ever did.
Pelosi's stances on oversight and other ways of pushing back on Trump are in part based in an inability to see them as a fundamentally dangerous group that will never deal in good faith.
Broadly speaking, there are two philosophies one can take, if you take as a given that Pelosi in particular, and the Dems in general, currently lack the power to directly do anything. On the issue of detainees, for example, there are a bunch of people in cages. There is no "release the detainees" button that Pelosi could push if only she had the will to do so. She arguably has a level of control over the funding going to ICE, but even that is action by proxy. There is nothing about funding that makes ICE have to stop detaining people, or makes conditions shittier or better. So if you want to help detainees by cutting funding, you have to hope that they don't just cut corners in ways that make things worse.
So Pelosi can focus on one of two things. First, she can try to foster public outrage in hopes that she can shame the Republicans (read: Trump and McConnell) into action. This is impossible with McConnell, because he has no conscience and is in a safe seat. Trump also has no conscience, but he's terrified of looking weak, so sometimes this can kind of work, but only really if it hits his base support. Since his base support is comprised of dispicable people who like the cruelty, this is also tricky.
This is presumably what is hoped for with opposing funding. The idea is that if we take away their dollars, Trump will be too scared of public outcry to order ICE to just throw more detainees into shittier conditions, and that this will directly lead to fewer detainees. Alternately, that if conditions are shittier, the outcry will be so large that Trump just backs off mass detainment in general, again resulting in fewer (or shorter) detainment.
The other strategy involves saying, "There's nothing we can do directly right now, Trump is gonna Trump, our best hope is to maximize our odds of taking the White House House 2020, at which point the new president can just change policy and end mass detainment directly." The decision to oppose funding, then, would hinge on whether it increases or decreases our odds of taking the White House, holding the House, and taking the Senate.
The third stance, I suppose, is to say "who cares if this action never helps a single detainee, it's the right thing to do," which is... a position, I guess.
Bottom line, it's all about political calculus. Framing arguments as "Pelosi is making a bad decision because this action will neither directly compel Republicans to change policy, nor increase our odds of winning in 2020," is a valid criticism (and one I agree with in some cases. "Pelosi is making a bad decision because X is the right thing to do" strikes me as specious much of the time, because it assumes that !X is being done out of malice or cowardice, and not out of a desire to accomplish good through another route.
Like, I get that the ends don't always justify the means. But it sometimes feels like means are conflated with tactics. If the right thing to do is go report a crime at the police station, and I think the best route is 1st Street, and you think the best route is Broadway, i'm not some immoral monster for choosing 1st. We still have the same goal! Maybe my route is a bad idea, but that's different from my route being an immoral idea.
So when people are saying that Pelosi should be doing something different, and that thinking about maintaining power is wrong, I sometimes wonder what they think the outcome of their preferred action is. If it's:
Pelosi does the Right Thing -> the media chooses to cover it accurately -> the people get properly outraged -> ??? -> detainees are released from cages (or people get healthcare, or whatever)
...what goes in the ???
Because if it's just "people turn out to vote in 2020" then that's not necessarily moral high ground. That's just tactics.
Even that doesn't work. Support for impeaching Trump amongst the general population is higher than the support for impeaching Nixon BEFORE the Nixon impeachment hearings started.
This last year has been shattering for my view of Pelosi. Mocked people who thought she was a bad choice for Speaker. I was wrong, they were right.
She doesn't want to rock the boat. Like Biden she acts like she has some utterly fucked up view that the GOP is filled with reasonable people who are just being temporarily led astray by bad leaders. As if Bush Jr and the Regan Administration didn't happen.
And the goddamn focus on the presidency over everything else is fist bitingly infuriating.
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Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I don't think they are focused on the presidency over everything else. Pelosi's tactics are not based in winning the Presidential election. I think you need only look at how the candidates in the primary are running as opposed to Pelosi and Schumer to see that. Pelosi is focused on keeping the House and basically all of what she's been up to is centred around that goal.
And winning the House, based on the results from 2018 and their interpretation of them, is a lot about winning them marginal formerly Republican districts.
There is this feeling very much that the Democratic Party Leadership, Pelosi included, see their positions like a sort of corporate-style meritocracy, a technocracy of civic bureaucracy. But the problem is that this ideal is incompatible with a system whose appointment structure isn't business style hiring and ladder climbing, but is at the mercies of a mercurial public scattered around a large chunk of a continent. But the party leadership heavily identifies with that sort of post-war 20th century ladder climbing "meritocracy," and so at every turn tends toward attempting to establish that within the structure of the party (where it is doable) and within government (where it is not as doable, because again, their positions depend on voter favor).
As a result, you see the modern Democratic Party as essentially a party of The National Status Quo. It doesn't really fight for things, it lets others do the fighting and then, once the status quo has shifted enough to be a safe position, then supports the changes. The Gay Marriage fight on this is a particular instance of that issue where the party didn't lead so much as waited until the public by and large went "We're supportive of gay marriage!"
However, the Justice Democrats, The Squad, whatever you want to label them in turn are much more understanding and accepting of the reality of electoral politics when it comes to how to function in the body of congress (that is, they are elected to fight for what they ran on, actively, not to be a a rung in the congressional hierarchy) and are much more willing to be active fighters for progressive change.
It's a distinct culture clash and one that threatens the power structure the Democratic Party has been building for the past several decades.