On Nancy Pelosi

Apparently the RNC put a sign up saying, "Hire Pelosi!", a reference, presumably, to their "Fire Pelosi!" campaign slogan, which was deeply sexist in any event. At face value, this seems to be an indication that they agree with those of us on the left that Pelosi should remain the Democrats' leader in the House. Because, as one commenter I saw put it, they still want to have Pelosi to kick around. For starters, I think it makes no sense to take it at face value: they would reasonable assume that liberals would read it like that commenter did, and would react in the opposite direction, so in posting it, maybe they were trying to get us to dump Pelosi. Or maybe they're operating at a higher level of reverse psychology, or a lower one. It's tough to discern, really.

But in any event, I think Republicans are misguided if they want to still have Pelosi to kick around. Yes, Pelosi has lousy favorability ratings (better than Boehner's, though). She's never been the most popular politician around, though, and she was part of the Democratic team that won big in '06 and '08. It's not like Republicans didn't demonize her in 2008. But it didn't work somehow, possibly because the fundamentals were the other way. Whether the President's messaging matters compared to "fundamentals" is one thing; I'm highly skeptical that, especially when the President is of the same party, the Speaker of the House's messaging matters very much at all. And do we really think that if Heath Schuler, or some more gravitas-laden centrist, became Minority Leader, that Republicans would stop demonizing them as a liberal? I doubt it.

Pelosi has two dominant House campaigns and one disasterous one to her name; arguably, none of the three had very much to do with her. 2006 was about Iraq, 2008 was about a combination of Iraq and the financial crisis, and 2010 was about the fact that the economy sucks. It's ambiguous whether Pelosi makes an impact, then, in Democratic electoral chances (and 2012 will likely be much more about Obama and coattails than the House itself); what we do know is that the two Pelosi-led Congresses passed a seriously transformative series of legislation, most of which died in the Senate or by George Bush's veto pen in the 110th Congress and all of which either died or was watered down in the Senate in the 111th. She is a truly great parliamentary leader. I'll take a great legislator with ambiguous electoral consequences any day of the week. Oh, and we will, too.