It's Nancy Pelosi's Parade - Dowd
(snip)
Some House liberals have been furious with the speaker since she capitulated to Republicans and Democratic moderates and agreed to pass a bill to send more funding to the border, giving up demands for stronger protections for the migrant children ensnared in the nightmare of shelters there. I asked Pelosi whether, after being the subject of so many you-go-girl memes for literally clapping back at Trump, it was jarring to get a bad headline like the one in HuffPost that day — “What The Hell Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?” The article described the outrage of the Squad, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts are known. Pelosi feels that the four made themselves irrelevant to the process by voting against “our bill,” as she put it, which she felt was the strongest one she could get. “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” she said. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
(snip)
She pinned the blame for the border bill on Mitch McConnell. In an era when millennials prize authenticity, she said, McConnell is “authentically terrible.” She has had a working relationship with him for years but now, she says, the Senate majority leader has “really crossed a threshold with me.” “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 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.”
(snip)
While the number of House Democrats who want an impeachment inquiry is growing — it’s up to 80 now — Pelosi knows that giving in to that primal pleasure could backfire. Is the Fifth Avenue trust fund baby who loves to play victim actually goading the Democrats into impeaching him? “Oh, he’d rather not be impeached,’’ she said. “But he sees a silver lining. And he wants to then say, ‘The Democrats impeached me but the Senate’ — he won’t say Republicans — ‘exonerated me.’ The thing is that, he every day practically self-impeaches by obstructing justice and ignoring the subpoenas.”
(snip)
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.
(snip)
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. 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.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/06/opinion/sunday/nancy-pelosi-pride-parade.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
