Trust Pelosi

[babylonsister]

Trust Pelosi
The speaker is outwitting Republicans for 2020—even if she isn’t talking about impeachment.
By William Saletan
May 08, 2019
8:09 PM

snip//

Pelosi understands that Trump is just a foil. The real goal is to build a relationship with voters. Contrary to perception, she hasn’t ruled out impeachment. But she does think Democrats should talk less about Trump and more about connecting with the public. She sidesteps questions about the president’s tweets, insisting that Democrats are focusing on helping ordinary people. When the speaker is asked about Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony to Congress on the Russia investigation, she talks instead about the Justice Department’s effort to gut the ACA. She believes that persuadable 2020 voters—those who aren’t sure which way they’ll vote or whether they’ll show up at all—care less about the fight between the parties than about which party is paying attention to their needs.

In Pelosi’s view, a politician’s job is to produce results. In the House, that requires 218 votes. The peril of the moment—an executive branch controlled by the most dangerous president in living memory—makes it even more crucial that Democrats maintain control of a chamber of Congress. The speaker calls herself “a liberal from San Francisco,” but she reminds colleagues that there aren’t enough deep blue districts to elect a majority. She focuses on issues that, while important to progressives, will also help Democrats in more vulnerable districts. On Tuesday, at the Cornell forum, Pelosi acknowledged that this “coldblooded” battle plan could cause “unease for some people who may want to go way in one direction.” But she warned that if Democrats were to lose the purple districts, the left would lose power altogether.

Some critics see Pelosi’s centrist language as weak and uninspiring. But she cares about policies, not ideologies, so she’s ruthless about embracing or shedding labels. She believes, for instance, that fairness is a more popular and less incendiary term than socialism. At a press conference last month, a reporter asked her about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pledge to make 2020 a referendum on socialism. Pelosi replied that McConnell had engineered tax cuts for the rich, and she asked what he was doing to help ordinary people. At Cornell, Pelosi accused Republicans of using the word socialism to hide their attacks on popular programs. “They’re saying that Medicare and Medicaid and raising the minimum wage are acts of socialism,” the speaker scoffed. “No, they’re not. They’re about fairness.”

A party can win more votes, in Pelosi’s view, by claiming to represent the middle than by claiming to represent a wing or a movement. “The Republicans have abandoned the center. The left can own it,” she argued on Tuesday. “Redefine what the center is, and don’t let them define our agenda as something that is far left.” On immigration, for example, Trump wants to frame Democrats as the party of “open borders.” Pelosi rejects that label—“we all agree we must secure our border,” she says—and narrows the debate to whether Trump’s wall is the best way to do it.

more...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/trust-pelosi.html

[mahina]

1. I do, fully.

She knows better than any of us were going to navigate this situation.

[StarfishSaver]

2. I love me some her!

[Maven]

3. In other words, she is working within the false frame that Republicans have created

which casts Democrats as out of touch and unwilling to compromise.

She's misreading the room.

People are angry, especially women who drove the blue wave in 2018. She is trying to "build a relationship with voters" by taking the focus off of Trump, but in the process, she risks demoralizing activists within the party who have driven our recent victories across the country. The GOP is a threat to our civil liberties, our financial security and our environment and by choosing Trump as their avatar, they've become a threat to our national security and the international order. The base recognizes that threat. What they want and need to see is a political fighter, not a happy bureaucrat who comes up with soft euphemisms to sell our policy priorities to "moderate" voters (read: reluctant conservatives).

I trust and respect Speaker Pelosi's instincts and skills as a legislative strategist. No one is more effective at it. But these are not normal times, and the insistence that business as usual can continue is causing a lot of cognitive dissonance among those who've worked tirelessly to get Democrats elected.

I also feel that the longer we wait on impeachment, the more it appears to the public that there is not much "there" there. Yet our leaders are so hooked on the idea of "working together to get things done", they are struggling to do their Constitutional duty and take real steps to address this threat. They continue to think that voters will reward them for being pragmatic as opposed to standing on principle. That needs to end, or the blue wave of 2018 may crash ashore before we get to 2020.