I don’t know a great deal about Nancy Pelosi other than what I’ve read in her Wikipedia article. Obviously some serious left-wing credentials there, particularly on gun control and abortion. So she’s a person conservatives aren’t going to care for very much. OK, that’s fine.
But the vitriole I’ve been hearing from my conservative acquaintances sounds a lot like that which informs their opinions of Hillary Clinton, and seems to lack specifics. Mostly I’m hearing a lot of, “Well, I just don’t like her.” However, I’m a details guy, and I’m interested in specifics.
So please tell me what about Speaker-Elect Pelosi’s policies you don’t like and why I should fear her coming tenure. I’d be particularly interested in how you would contrast her policies to Dems of varying stripes, like say Ted Kennedy, Jim Webb, and Hillary Clinton. Should I be more worried about Pelosi than them?
Basically, Pelosi is a bit more Liberal than the more fearful Right wingers are comfortable with and she comes from (shudder) California.
This is not to say that there are not legitimate concerns (from a Right wing perspective), but with no power for most of her years in office, it is hard to tell how much of her rhetoric expresses genuine scary things and how much was simply intended to energize the opposition through the long years without power.
I don’t know how some conservative Republican pundits are planning to reconcile their new take on Pelosi as a moderate Democrat with their earlier pants-pissing scare talk about what a dangerous lefty she is:
If conservatives were to keep on calling Pelosi a dangerous liberal extremist now that the Dems have taken Congress, they would have to conclude that American voters have decided that even dangerous liberal extremists are a better choice than Republicans.
So voila, Pelosi is suddenly described as a moderate, and the election is described as a victory for centrism and a rejection of liberalism.
Mandatory abortions for all. I don’t care if you’re a single guy living by yourself – you’re getting an abortion, and there’s not anything you can do about it.
I don’t think that’s a fair interpretation of what they were saying. It’s a legitmate question to ask if a politician is going to take a more moderate stance once she is in a poistion as Speaker of the House than she would as a representative from SF.
I’m glad someone openned this thread, though, as I wanted to open a similar one myself. I really don’t know too much about her, but always assumed she was pretty far left of center (not that there’s anything worng with that), being from SF. I do understand, though, that a lot of the real lefties in SF don’t much care for her, and even the SF Chronicle didn’t endorse her in '04. So, what’s the scoop on Speaker Pelosi’s politics? Maybe we can have an intelligent discussion if we list her position on key issues rather than worrying about whether she’s a liberal or how much of a liberal she is.
Because she’s plotting to ram a Bush-Cheney simulpeachment through Congress, elevate herself to the presidency, seize absolute power and usher in the dictatorship of the pansexual tree-hugging smoke-a-bowletariat.
Actually, she has been getting a lot of flak lately from her district for not being liberal enough. Her move towards the center has kinda pissed off the extreme elements of her constituency.
I am looking forward to her Speakership. I disagree with most of her politics, but if she can hold the Center, we might just survive what the Republicans have wrought.
Who was asking that question, though? AFAICT, magellan and Evil One were explicitly arguing that Pelosi as Speaker would probably be moderate, not simply asking whether she would become more moderate.
Well, the OP specifically started this thread partly to find out “how much of a liberal she is”, i.e., “how you would contrast her policies to Dems of varying stripes, like say Ted Kennedy, Jim Webb, and Hillary Clinton”.
If you don’t think we can have an intelligent discussion about that, you’ll have to take it up with the OP.
Yes, it’s a legitimate thing to speculate about, certainly. IMO, though, it is also being used as a conservative talking point. Conservatives are emphasizing Pelosi’s new or newly-discovered or potential moderation as Speaker of the House (and hoping that their listeners will ignore earlier conservative squealing about how terrible it would be if a left-wing extremist like Pelosi ever got to be Speaker of the House) partly because it makes the conservative defeat look less bad.
No, John, it was in the very part of your own post that I quoted just before posting that sentence. (Never mind, we all get momentary “post blindness” from time to time.)
Not in so many words, perhaps, but isn’t it obvious that the OP is asking where Pelosi falls on the spectrum of more-liberal and less-liberal “Dems of varying stripes”?
How does that support your argument? After all, that “pragmatic winning message” that Pelosi was apparently working on between 2002 and 2006 is what a lot of conservatives have been screaming about as Pelosi’s catastrophically dangerous extremist leftism. At least, until last Tuesday.
Your linked article in fact contains a stellar example of pre-Democratic-Congress conservative outrage about Pelosi’s extremism:
If Pelosi actually is what most conservatives would consider reasonably moderate and pragmatist, and if this has been noted in the media since back in 2002, that just makes the many conservatives who’ve been whining and wailing about her dangerous liberal extremism look like fools. Or liars. Or both.
I’ve become more and more convinced that the unthinking (not all by any stretch) members of the right need bogeymen (or bogeywomen in Pelosi’s case). And the Republican party is more than able to play on that by creating these bogeypeople (I’m nothing if not PC) to solidfy and energize their base, especially around election time. All Muslims, outspoken homosexuals, Hillary, and Pelosi are the latest forms of bogeypeople that the right wing nutjobs have grasped onto, with help by the Republican party.
I suppose the Democrats are guilty of this kind of pandering also (the fear of citizens being held as enemy combatants without habeas protections), but I don’t see it as much. Perhaps it’s my own bias (or the Padilla case), though.
You seemed to have been implying that the quote came from the OP. But we can let the OP clarify what he wants when he comes back into the thread.
Which argument? It supports the fact that the idea needn’t be conservative spin because it’s what Pelosi said about herself.
So what? Just because some Republicans in Congress and some pundits try to demonize her doesn’t mean that the two posters you quoted were tryiing to spin something. I just think you unfairly mischaracterized what those posters were saying by dismissing it as conservative spin, especially in light of the fact that Pelosi said essentially the same thing. I don’t think your dragging those quotes back into this thread did anything to get at what the OP is asking about. Do you?
