Basically they should try to actually pass the hr1 from the start of this legislative term (which includes a VRA restoration and a lot of other voting and campaign issues).
There might be legal issues to deal with, but once leadership settles on something, there really is no excuse not to vote for it for anyone in congress who wants to call themselves a democrat. I think the campaign finance side of it might have more of a legal hurdle than the VRA part of it, but that’s not really that important.
Actually I have to correct myself. Apparently the House did pass legislation in 2019 that would set a new formula for pre-clearance, and a Senate version had 48 cosponsors — 47 Democrats and Lisa Murkowski.
I think age and experience are assets when being a parliamentarian.
I think Pelosi had some flops, but she also punctured the President’s tough guy facade a few times. She fucking owned him during the government shutdown, which was probably one of her biggest moments. Impeachment made Trump stronger for a while but I don’t see what choice she had: he was daring the Dems to impeach him by running a lawless administration. Impeaching him at a time of unprecedented polarization was bound to be a lost cause but not impeaching him in the face of such brazen illegality would have demotivated the Democratic base in 2020 - she was sure not to make that long term mistake despite short-term consequences.
Pelosi was also good at not allowing ideological differences within the party fracture Biden’s democratic coalition, which was not at all easy or a certain outcome in February of last year when Sanders was starting to pile up wins in primaries and potentially take the party leadership in a different direction, over the objections of the many centrists who quietly keep the party competitive in key swing states.
Obama was 38 when he took office and Clinton 46. Carter was 53. LBJ 55 . None of those guys was too young. It’s not just that the DC fossils are 70 or older some of them never had non government jobs. That applies to both parties.
Neither did any of the presidents you cite, except for Jimmy Carter. Actually Obama did, briefly, I suppose, but those jobs weren’t exactly what you’d call “private sector” jobs.
My point being that I have no issue with career politicians.
I do have an issue with politicians clinging to outdated ideologies that brought them to their current positions in leadership.
It’s time to bury Clinton-style neoliberalism in a very deep grave.
I’m not against those policies, but they don’t require someone young to push them. Eleanor Norton is 39 years older and drastically to the left of Kyrsten Sinema.
How would a politician/statesman become an expert in that field?
Sometimes I wonder if Nancy Pelosi’s main skill is somehow convincing everyone she’s a political mastermind. I hear this constantly, and yet I’ve never seen any evidence of it. What is she supposed to be so great at? The democrats under her watch are basically the Washington Generals to the Repoublican Harlem Globetrotters. They put up some token resistance that gives us the impression that the republicans have some sort of opposition, but they can’t ever manage to win, despite having the natural advantage of being behind the policies that a vast majority of Americans support.
What big victories has she engineered? What are her savvy moves? When has she won the mind of the public? When has she advanced the democratic agenda more than any other democratic congressman would have?
She was probably the most powerful democrat during the most incomptent, evil, and depostic presidential administration we ever had. This should’ve given her an opportunity for winning the minds of the American public. The great statesman of the past would’ve made memory speech after memorable speech against the encroaching fascism and authoritarianism to rally the American public against it. What do you remember Nancy Pelosi doing in all this time? The only memorable thing she did was a sarcastic clap at the State of the Union addresses.
She did a lot to normalize what Trump and the republicans were doing by treating it like it was normal politics as usual. She could’ve got on all the networks at once and talked to the American people about how the Republicans were taking over our government and exhibiting dangerous anti-democracy tendencies, but she did none of that. What did she do, write some tepid letters of protest against the republican agenda?
Oh, but the speaker is a parliamentarian and she’s a genius at that, right? What are her big wins? Obamacare? When she let republicans make 206 amendments making the ACA worse, and then they all voted against it anyway? Savvy move there, Pelosi. Taking one of the greatest crisis that could’ve united the American people behind a legislative agenda, the pandemic, and then… doing nothing with it. Sure, McConnel is killing a lot of shit, but she should be out there making him pay a political price for it, rallying the country to her side. She did jack shit. Republicans absolutely stomp democrats on parliamentary tricks under her watch.
I think there’s an Emporer’s New Clothes situation with Pelosi. People start saying she’s this savvy political genius, and people don’t want to feel like they’re out of the loop/not savvy enough to see this, so they start repeating “yeah, Pelosi is a savvy political genius!” just to fit in. No one feels confident enough that they know what a speaker is supposed to do, so no one objects. End result, everyone thinks Pelosi is some political genius despite not being able to point to anything she’s good at or anything she’s done.
My guess is that she’s good at fund raising and has a lot of personal connections/ass kissing with rich donors. That is, unfortunately, an important skill in politics, but it certainly doesn’t justify everyone claiming she’s a political genius or wasting the bully pulpit of the speaker position on her.
They don’t, of course (as proven by the Sanders phenomenon). My point is that much of the older leadership of the Democratic Party seems to be stuck with the ideology of decades ago. That’s not necessarily because of their age.
There are plenty of young centrist Democrats who would happily govern from a spot slightly to the right of Richard Nixon, as well as the old guard of the party. It’s not an age thing.