But guess what? They work.” Nonpartisan observers agree.
“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. But they say her unpopularity is too heavy a load to bear. The Democrats who want Pelosi gone don’t deny her talent. When the journalist Michael Tracey traveled through Montana before it held a special House election last May, he was, he wrote on CNBC’s website, “struck by the frequency with which folks cited aversion to Pelosi as the reason why they’d backed the Republican.” 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. “ Say No to Pelosi’s Yes Man,” a GOP commercial instructed.
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. In the Trump era, as Republican vulnerability has mounted, the GOP has targeted Pelosi yet again. Four years after that, in the run-up to 2016, they invoked her three times as often. 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. 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.” And for good reason: Internal Republican polling showed that Pelosi was far less popular than the president. 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. The GOP has been using her as a scarecrow ever since. W ithin 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. But because she’s a woman, she may not be doing it well enough. Nancy Pelosi does her job about as well as anyone could. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians usually are. 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. Another coup attempt erupted last summer.
In November 2016, almost a third of House Democrats voted to depose her as leader. history.” Yet many of her colleagues want her gone. 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. Pelosi quickly secured the votes to prevent Republicans from overturning the agreement, thus checkmating the deal’s foes. 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. 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. But that gave antiabortion Democrats cover to support the bill, which passed with nary a Republican vote. She enraged her pro-choice allies by allowing a vote on an amendment prohibiting women insured through the law’s health-care exchanges from receiving government-subsidized abortions. The following year, when Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff, suggested scaling back health-care reform after the Democrats’ surprise Senate loss in Massachusetts, Pelosi insisted that Obama maintain his goal of universal coverage. In 2009, Pelosi persuaded deficit-wary Blue Dog Democrats to back Barack Obama’s stimulus package, and it passed without a single Republican vote. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
0 kommentar(er)
