Maureen Dowd:
It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade
“With all due respect, the press likes to make a story that is more about Democrats divided than the fact that Mitch McConnell doesn’t care about the children,’’ she [NP] said, referring to what she called “trash” stories about a supposed rift between her and Chuck Schumer.
She also accused the press of “constantly enabling” Trump by allowing him to suck up all the oxygen and says journalists are “accomplices to their own denigration.”
“You would think that within a couple of days, 48 hours or so, of seeing that little child with her father, there would have been some challenge of conscience,’’ she said of Republicans.
“But understand this: They don’t care.”
. . . .
The speaker, who is trying to keep the party center left, must know that getting Trump out of office is a goal that could be jeopardized by the fact that the Democrats lurched so far left in the first debates, with bilingual pandering and talk about busing and decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing private health insurance.
This is the pol whose name was synonymous for decades with extreme San Francisco liberalism.
(A “Saturday Night Live” sketch in 2006 depicted Pelosi, played by Kristen Wiig, talking to a pair of chain-and-leather-clad aides, one with a ball-gag in his mouth.)
Now, astonishingly, the woman formerly scorned as a pinko is the voice of moderation, urging the kids to turn down the music and slow their roll or risk having a second unbearable helping of Trump.
“If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,” she said, breezily.
“As I say to these people, come to my basement. I have these signs about single-payer from 30 years ago. I understand what they’re saying. But we have a responsibility to get something done, which is different from advocacy. We have to have a solution, not just a Twitter fight.”
. . . .
Pelosi is womanly — often surrounded by her children and grandchildren — and yet she seems blithely unencumbered by insecurity about her gender.
This is in marked contrast to Hillary Clinton, the only other woman who rose to these heights in American politics.
She was certainly tough enough, brainy enough and experienced enough to take on Trump.
But she was always getting wrapped around the gender axel, ignoring Tina Fey’s advice to take a bad-ass “bitch is the new black” approach.
. . . .
Her experiences with the last two Democratic presidents were not exactly a stroll down the Embarcadero.
Bill Clinton upended his party with his reckless, selfish affair with an intern.
She must have loathed that fathead; I certainly did.
But it started when he betrayed his own party the first [and, admittedly, lesser] time, saying "The era of Big Government is over."
Barack Obama never could have scooted past Clinton Inc. without Pelosi’s well-manicured thumb on the scale for him, and he certainly could not have passed the Affordable Care Act without her muscle.
But in the midterms that followed, Pelosi lost 63 of her foot soldiers and her gavel; some in the party felt that President Obama had failed to supply enough air cover for the members who had gone out on a limb for him after Pelosi cajoled and prodded in a manner that L.B.J. would have admired.
. . . .
If combating an inhumane Trump requires a superhuman effort, Pelosi may be just the woman to do it.
Her staffers tell the story of how, last April, Pelosi was with a congressional delegation in Dublin, about to deliver a major address to the Irish Parliament.
As she got into her Suburban in the motorcade, a 300-pound armored car door was accidentally closed on her right hand, crushing it in the locking mechanism.
The attending physician could offer her only ordinary Band-Aids to stop the bleeding from the wounds on her hand and Advil for a tear so bad that doctors who stitched her up afterward said that she could have lost her fingers.
Pelosi not only managed to get through the speech. She shook hundreds of hands without flinching.
When I asked her about it, she was only rueful that she couldn’t concentrate enough to speak the Gaelic she had practiced.
The show must go on, eh?
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