You’re right. They do sure have a lot of female boogeymen, though.
In fairness to Bernie and his supporters, this really tracks back to the Russians. The Bernie folks were understandably angered, on purpose, by the release of the Clinton campaign’s private emails. The Russians meant to divide… and boy, howdy, did they ever get their money’s worth.
I do actually think it can be replicated overnight. They reach for the smear almost instantly and – up to now, at least – have used it successfully to a dismaying degree. Hell, now they all just start chanting, “Lock her/him up!” and for purposes of their base, it’s automatically a successful smear.
Do you believe that fewer of their base despise Maxine Waters than Nancy Pelosi? I’d bet the figure is roughly 35-40% in either instance. They don’t need name recognition. They just have to hear it from the rubbery lips of their messiah. They hate whomever they’re told to hate. I’ll allow it isn’t nearly as effective on independents.
My only real issue is that Dems should not let their choice be guided by what Republicans are doing with it. They’re going to do it with everyone.
Pelosi herself recently said something to the effect of “You don’t let your opponents pick your leaders.” Which is completely correct. I don’t know whether she should be speaker. I happen to like her a lot, and think she’s very effective. But the choice should be made by Democrats, based on what’s best for Democrats.
They wouldn’t need to replicate it. They’d just keep on using the one that they already have. Again, it was never a campaign against Pelosi; it was a campaign against the Democratic house leader. Literally nothing would need to be changed except the name.
For those of you asking what mud does Pelosi have on her? Don’t forget she ramrodded ACA through saying “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”. WTF?! That is so wrong especially for a legislative leader to say on something that contoversial. I know the Dems can contextualize it and say she didn’t really mean what she said but
*How many Americans take that much effort to research anything?
*As a soundbite alone it really demonizes Pelosi as SOTH.
Franken got forced out because Gillibrand is an opportunist who was gifted a Senate seat and has never done anything with it and saw a chance to bump out a potential competitor in the 2020 primary.
However, do note that Pelosi is possibly the most effective and powerful Democrat and female politician, which is why the GOP hates her and spreads Fake news and etc about her.
*These victories led Thomas Mann, who studies Congress at the Brookings Institution, to call Pelosi the “strongest and most effective speaker of modern times.” And even after being relegated to minority leader when Republicans took the House in 2010, she kept winning legislative fights. In the summer of 2015, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Republican Party launched a mammoth lobbying campaign to kill Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Pelosi quickly secured the votes to prevent Republicans from overturning the agreement, thus checkmating the deal’s foes.
In addition to being a masterful legislative tactician, the 77-year-old Pelosi is, in Politico’s words, “the most successful nonpresidential political fundraiser in U.S. history.” Yet many of her colleagues want her gone. In November 2016, almost a third of House Democrats voted to depose her as leader. Another coup attempt erupted last summer. Why so much discontent with a woman who has proved so good at her job? Maybe because many Democrats think Pelosi’s unpopularity undermines their chances of winning back the House. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians usually are. Therein lies the tragedy. Nancy Pelosi does her job about as well as anyone could. But because she’s a woman, she may not be doing it well enough.*
The “strongest and most effective speaker of modern times.” And you want her gone because she’s Old? Or because you have been led into this by the constant Fake news and negative attacks on Nancy by the GOp and the Kremlin?
It is very simple- if the GOP gates her and fears her and is working hard to get rid of her- then us Dems need her.
And then you have let the GOP hate machine pick our leader for us.
That is very foolish.
We need to ignore the GOP hate machine and pick the most effective leader- which is Pelosi.
The GOP hate machine will simply attack whoever is effective, and then if we pick the one with the least “political baggage” we end up picking the least effective leader, *exactly like the GOP wants us to do. *
There’s nothing solid. The GOP hate machine has been working hard to get that -25% approval rating, since they fear and hate Pelosi.
Basically by picking someone that has a good approval rating, you are picking someone that the GOP does not fear or hate- someone ineffective. If they do have a decent approval rating now, but show themselves to be effective, very soon they will have that same -25% approval rating. If they are ineffective the GOP will allow them to continue. is that what we want?
That rating is 100% manufactured by GOP propaganda. We need to ignore those ratings.
*Within days of pelosi’s ascension to House minority leader, in 2003, back when nearly 60 percent of Americans still had no idea who she was, the Republican Party featured her visage—“garish and twisted,” in the words of a magazine article at the time—in an ad against a Democrat running for Congress in Louisiana. The GOP has been using her as a scarecrow ever since. Before the 2010 midterms, the National Republican Congressional Committee cited Pelosi in an astonishing 70 percent of its ads—far more than the percentage that cited Obama. And for good reason: Internal Republican polling showed that Pelosi was far less popular than the president. After Democrats lost their House majority that fall, Congressman Allen Boyd of Florida, whose reelection bid failed, called hers “the face that defeated us in this last election.”
In the run-up to the 2012 elections, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, Republicans invoked Pelosi in television ads seven times as often as they invoked the Senate’s Democratic leader, Harry Reid. Four years after that, in the run-up to 2016, they invoked her three times as often.
In the Trump era, as Republican vulnerability has mounted, the GOP has targeted Pelosi yet again. Last summer, when the Democrat Jon Ossoff showed surprising strength in a special election for a House seat in Georgia, Republicans responded with millions of dollars in ads tying him to Pelosi. “Say No to Pelosi’s Yes Man,” a GOP commercial instructed. One piece of Republican mail depicted a laughing Pelosi maneuvering Ossoff like a marionette alongside the words “Now She’s in Control.” Another featured Pelosi ripping off an Ossoff mask. …The Democrats who want Pelosi gone don’t deny her talent. But they say her unpopularity is too heavy a load to bear. “The Republican playbook for the past four election cycles has been very focused, very clear,” Representative Kathleen Rice, a Democrat from New York, insisted after Ossoff’s defeat. “It’s been an attack on our leader. Is it fair? No. Are the attacks accurate? No. But guess what? They work.” Nonpartisan observers agree. …One might think grassroots Democratic enthusiasm for Pelosi would offset her lack of appeal among Republicans and independents. The party, after all, is moving left, where Pelosi has been all along.*
Pelosi: "Americans deserve to know what’s in the bill. …We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. "
Or maybe because there are tons of progressives like me who think the bar to be a Senator should be high enough that groping (or even faux-groping) and any violation of consent is enough to render one morally unqualified.