More succinctly, Nancy Pelosi makes my skin crawl because she’s just as bad as any other politician. It’s embarrassing and humiliating for me to admit this, but evidently I am every bit as susceptible to Republican-generated bullshit as anyone else. Nancy Pelosi is every PR person's dream come true: the messaging document has transcended bullet points and words and is now political scripture, and it goes something like this: Nancy Pelosi is an unapologetically liberal politician. She’s a rich bitch. Since she represents San Francisco, she’s an elitist, she’s out of touch with real America and the people who live there, and she should be disposed of immediately.
I woke up, sort of, one night not long before the elections when I happened to tune into her being interviewed by Charlie Rose. Speaking of crawling skin, Charlie Rose, along with Oprah, is one of the worst interviewers I’m aware of. He does more talking than the guests – that alone should get you fired, I think, but that’s just me – and most of his talking is beneath banal. And Nancy Pelosi was having none of it. If there is a man who has man-handled Charlie Rose more effectively than Nancy Pelosi, it’s a spectacle I’ve yet to witness. The next day I looked up her legislative record, which I realize is sort of an elitist thing to do during election season, and my reaction is hard to describe. Blown away, perhaps. Stunned. Guilty. Maybe all three. It seems to me she is one of the last remaining politicians who didn’t succumb to Pappy Bush’s degradation of liberalism by referring to it as “the L word” during the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns. Pappy was a man’s man, a national father figure and a direct link to the most revered president of our time, and his smears were interpreted by the majority of Democrats, including the Clintons, as guidance from the invisible hand of God to shift from the left to the center, which they’ve been doing dutifully now for 20 years.
For the next several days I listened to many, many people on the radio and television and internets reiterate over and over again how forward they were looking to voting against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. All of the bellowing was done with zero regard for the fact that there was not a national election last week. Also absent was any acknowledgement of how far from or close to San Francisco the orator or his or her audience lived. No matter: according to Mama Grizzly and many others we fired Nancy Pelosi and put Barack Obama on a performance plan last week (we did neither, in my opinion, but this is hardly the time for technicalities). As I listened I was overtaken with the same sense of quiet dread that usually accompanies the dreams I have where I’m in houses I’ve known for decades, only the rooms are completely and irrationally rearranged, and no one but me seems bothered or even surprised.
Are we really that retarded? I wondered through it all. Am I really that gullible? Yes, and yes. And I suppose I should show some gratitude to Charlie Rose.
Those are scary thoughts and questions for me, but, as always, there’s more: as Nancy Pelosi was being demonized with a measure of misogyny so vehement it made the Salem witch trials seem like a mismanaged but harmless badminton tournament, where were the Democrats? They were hiding, as usual, caving. It’s a very bad thing to be associated with Nancy Pelosi, so the script said, and so they bailed. Until, of course, it was too late. Once the Republicans had reclaimed control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, nervy woman that she is, decided she wanted to retain some sort of leadership position even though her party had been dethroned. And since the commercials had run their course, her fellow Democrats decided, with ringing clarity, at long last, to stand by their leader. For this reason and thousands more, it’s not at all surprising to me that the Democrats lost the majority in the house, but that they ever managed to attain it in the first place.
