The Leader
We sure missed seeing accurate headlines on Speaker Pelosi’s 60 Minutes appearance last night. The president watched her and fumed about a journalistic “puff piece” on Twitter while she attacked him, but the lede, buried, should have been her casual dismissal of the revolution that’s taking place inside her party.She told the CBS News Sunday night program, dismissively, that the progressive wing of her caucus, described as being in open rebellion against moderates, amounted to “like five people.” As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and the progressives in question are self-identified socialists or democratic socialists, Pelosi remarked, “I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have their view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party.”
Wow, and look who speaks definitively for it? She believes she does, and not them, even though she maintained her grip on the leadership of the majority party this past winter seemingly at their mercy, and now for how long? When I ran for Iowa statehouse in 2008 as a member of the Iowa Green Party against an incumbent Democrat, I remember telling voters at an Iowa CCI (Citizens for Community Improvement) forum that it didn’t matter what my progressive, incumbent opponent promised as a priority of his office. What mattered was the priorities of his party’s leadership. He argued for radical prison reform in the state, for example, but that issue didn’t matter to Democratic leadership at Iowa’s Capitol then, nor to the Democratic Party when taken as a whole, and sure enough, 11 years later, we’ve still seen nothing resembling progress or change on that issue. It has never even been raised to the level of public debate.
This is how the process works. The incumbent leadership in Washington always argues that we should trust that they know best how the proverbial sausage gets made, and Pelosi is chief among the leaders in constantly making that claim. She went on to tell 60 Minutes very specifically, “By and large, whatever orientation (House Democrats) came to Congress with, they know that we have to hold the center… that we have to go down the mainstream.”
And pray tell, Nancy, where is the center? Where is the mainstream? Can you feel it shifting under you?
posted by CM @ 7:53 PM
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