Wednesday, November 14, 2012

More Nancy Please

Nancy Pelosi is soon to announce whether she'll be staying on as House Democratic Leader. I think she's very likely to continue. Anonymous Senior Democrat is quoted as saying, “She doesn’t want to do anything else. Is she going to back to her vineyard and raise grapes?” Sounds right to me -- she has a lot of passion for her job, to the point that I'm a little surprised when questions about this arise every two years or so.

And as all of you would expect, I hope she stays on. Minority Leaders have much less power than Speakers, but there's an important role for her to play in the upcoming session. Lots of people are talking about Grand Bargains that may be hostile to progressive interests, and which might divide the Republican caucus. That'll create a need for Democratic votes, which a more centrist leader might be too ready to provide. Eight years ago when Pelosi ascended to the leadership, she blocked Social Security Privatization from even getting through the House. With her leading Democrats, I'm confident that bad stuff won't get through. 

1 comment:

longwalkdownlyndale said...

I'd agree with you that she will be good for progressives for policy reasons, but I do think the leadership needs of reshuffle of some kind. It looks like the house Dems will only pick up 7 to 8 seats this cycle. That's just frankly terrible, it was a banner year for Democrats at every other level, they were running against a enormously unpopular Congress, they had over 60 freshmen GOP members to target (as a member of Congress your first re-election is almost always your toughest) and the GOP took profoundly unpopular votes on things like the Ryan budget. And as Jonathan Bernstein pointed out at Plumline today, no redistricting was not to blame. The result of the Democrats leadership's fumbling of the 2012 election cycle (of which Nancy is the dominant factor) is that a huge number of tea party wackos will be in Congress, probably for a very longtime. Maybe she should stay but we need significant changes in the leadership below her, they blew it big time.