That’s what cracks me up about politics junkies. They often think that because they are politically that everyone else is too. They are not. I’m guessing the majority of Americans either have no idea who Pelosi is, what a Minority Leader is, and probably don’t care.
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Agree 100%. Most p[eople are busy getting to work ontime, raising their kids, and maybe peek at evening news every so often.
Have a great Thanksgiving.
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…and well he should. Without her, no ObamaCare, about which he was AWOL until Ted Kennedy died.
Spot on, Mr. President! Contrary to the opinions of self-important blowhards who talk for a living and mistakenly think that the job of Speaker involves public speaking, it’s really about getting shit done. For interpretation, 115th Congress is the current bunch of slackers, Pelosi was Speaker for 110th and 111th, Boehner and Ryan came after her, Hastert before.
Grain of salt: Naming shit after St. Ronnie Raygun counts equal to Affordable Care Act on this chart.
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What selective memory you have, you’re the kind of guy who curses his own house after the hurricane blew it off its footings, never mind the years it kept you warm and the rain off your head. You conveniently forget Pelosi was the first female major party leader in history, and lead the party to flipping the House in 2006, advanced to first female speaker in history, then lead the House D’s in the wave election of 2008. Just to reach those positions she had to be twice as tough and four times as mean as her colleagues, they don’t hand out those jobs for trick-or-treats y’know.
If you blame her for losing the House in 2010, well you gotta blame Obama and the DNC just as much, they dropped Dean’s 50-state strategy which gave them the wave in the first place (or do you think an inspiring candidate is able to do that all on his own? If so, I have a bridge I’d like you to look at, make me an offer). The PPACA, flawed as it is, would have been a dead letter without her dogged determination to get it passed. And if they hadn’t passed it , the D’s would have had a much bigger defeat in '10. My wife was uninsurable before that, we’re both self-employed and now we have very good and affordable coverage, which saved her life and us from bankruptcy a couple years later. But that counts for nothing to you, I can see, you probably have a nice safe day job and regular paycheck, or you’re an old fart collecting Medicare and SS, smugly thinking “screw all them whippersnappers,” even though it’s our ongoing FICA payments that will keep the programs running until you, and we, die.
The so-called “Tea Party” didn’t arise from the PPACA passage, not at all, it was a purpose-built astroturf effort funded by the Kochs and their allied “think tanks”. The TP started as ignorant well-off whites blaming brown people for the Great Recession, but once their puppetmasters tagged the PPACA as Obamacare, it was easy to shift their anger to brown people getting free doctor visits. Two years wasn’t long enough to climb out of the hole we were in after the Great Recession, even if homeowners had been bailed out instead of banks, so the midterms were gonna be brutal for D’s no matter what they did. I wish they had done more while they had majorities, unfortunately the PPACA was so complex and involved so many stakeholders, it tied up Congress’s attention for way too long. But it did pass, it had to pass, and now there is a de facto right to access to health care that this last election proved people across the spectrum are not going to relinquish without a knock-down drag-out. You can thank Pelosi, Reid, and the rest of the D’s for taking the heat and getting it done. They knew it was flawed, but they also know that the art of the possible is about moving the ball downfield, getting a first down and grinding it out for another. The difference is, there’s no end zone in politics, the game’s never over and no one wins the Super Bowl, because there isn’t one.
So, were you born yesterday, or are you just UN-remembering these things so you can grind your little axe? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, I don’t actually care what you think. But people need to speak up when other people go on about stupid shit.
And I agree with Obama, the first thing you notice about the public Pelosi is she’s awful in front of the cameras. But I’m always more about results than optics. Behind the scenes, she don’t care, she’s too busy kicking ass and taking names.
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You too! Eat up!
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In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning.
Let’s not worry who’s hip. Let’s get some legislation.
Pick a field. Any fucking field, I don’t care. There’s a lot that has to be done.
Let’s do it all.
Yeah, I blame Obama more than Pelosi for the mid-term slaughter in 2010. He was politically naive, and the Republicans took advantage of it. He never ever learned how to play political hardball.
The Democrats took back the House in 2006 due to Republican backlash (sound familiar?) against George W. Bush. Of course, instead of burying the Republicans after 2008, Obama did all he could to rehabilitate them while they worked to demonize him and the Democrats. He never understood who and what he was up against. And, as I have mentioned many times, he made a huge error in firing Dean. Kaine and Wasserman-Schultz were failures as the heads of the DNC.
Under the ACA less than half the number of people who were uninsured at the start were able to get insurance by the end of Obama’s Presidency. There were still more than 28 million without coverage. Sure it helped many (like you), but it never came close to helping as many people as Obama, Biden, and Pelosi said that it would. The numbers don’t lie. And the roll-out was horrible, another unforced error.
So it is nice that you and your wife got yours, but there are still 10’s of millions of people left behind by the ACA.
The vaunted “recovery” was great for the top 5% of Americans, but most middle class and poor Americans still have not recovered to where they were prior to the recession. Again, the numbers don’t lie.
Obama tried to do good things. He was immensely talented in many ways, but his inexperience and inability to understand the hardball politics of the situation, particularly in the first 2 years in office, destroyed the Democratic Party’s majorities. I think Biden gave him bad advice, too. To borrow your analogy, the electoral slaughter in 2010 was the equivalent of a team giving up an insurmountable lead in the first quarter, and never being able to recover during the remainder of his game.
Had Obama worked to counteract to the hardball politics of the Republicans and not regarded politics as “petty” he might have been able to build the Democratic Party and a sustainable progressive movement. Instead he left office with the Democratic Party completely out-of-power in Washington and in almost 2/3 of state legislatures. That is a colossal failure. Again, the numbers don’t lie.
And now decades of slow progress are in danger of being completely reversed because of this colossal failure.
Finally, your personal attacks on me add nothing to an otherwise thoughtful post, and your assumptions about me are completely wrong.
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I follow no one blindly. Pelosi has basically said. Once again. She not looking to impeach. She took it off the table last time. That was a direlection of duty.
Obama wanted to look forward. Well we now have Trump.
Why dont we just run Hillary again.
I need people in the Democratic party that understand the GOP for what they are.
The greatest threat to this country. They are nothing more than a Ponzi scheme with a cult following that should be labeled a hate group.
We will see if Pelosi knows that. There will come a time when she has to impeach.
She won’t. She will use the Senate as an excuse. That has nothing to do with her own responsibility. She shiriked it before. She will do it again.
When Stephen Miller is president 10 years from now. I wonder how glad you will be when then Dems once again didn’t hold the republican party responsible for their out right treason.
Since Reagan with the Iraq and Iran weapons deal.
If you dont learn from your history.
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Thats what looking forward gets you.
No Iraq war hearings on TV everyday.
The tea party isn’t the lead. Who cares about the tea party when the GOP has to defend lying us into war everyday.
Maybe. Just maybe. The American people aren’t riled up by a fake astro turf group.
The Gerrymandering never happens.
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I hear this a lot, but actually I don’t agree. In interactive settings I like the way she organizes her comments, almost always driving home the points she wants to make. Not easy.
Sure, it’s not soaring rhetoric at a podium, but that’s not always what I’m looking for.
Anyway, I’m sure it’s just a personal thing.
And as @georgeh and others point out, she is not without her weak points.
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Besides misunderstanding, sometimes it’s just that they get their money from the same places.
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Impeachment is off the table.
Selective memory. Seems like history is repeating itself.
She’s all but said impeachment is off the table. AGAIN.
Pelosi doesn’t want to impeach. She will use the Senate as an excuse. You heard it here first.
When she refuses to impeach him because she doesnt believe the Senate will act. It will be a direlection of duty.
Like when she was named speaker in 2006 and didnt want to look at Bush/Cheney. Trump is what looking forward will get you.
But hey. Hillary was nominated after supporting the Iraq war. I guess millons of dems suffer from that selective memory you speak of.
Ms. Impeachement is off the table and Mr. Look forward.
The GOP is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme with a cult following that should be labeled a hate group. They are the greatest threat to this democracy. They need to be destroyed.
When it comes to taking on that hate group. Sorry. These aren’t the people I look for to do that.
Do you think the House should impeach even if it’s unlikely the Senate will convict?
(Not asking specifically about Trump or Pelosi.)
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Actually, I do because crimes are crimes, and Presidential crimes should be prosecuted. Let the prosecutors’ case be made in the Senate, and then if Senators vote against obvious evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors, then let voters hold them accountable.
But this “we can’t do it because unlikely the Senate will convict” is putting the verdict before the trial. Guilty or not guilty, that is not the way justice is supposed to work.
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Well, in 1998 the Republican House impeached Clinton and then the Senate failed to convict. Of course, this all happened after the 1998 elections. We’ll never know what would have happened to the Republicans if the impeachment and acquittal had come before the election, but we do know that their poll numbers fell.
And in the Congressional elections of 2000, the Democrats gained four seats (net) in the Senate — the first time they had made a net gain since 1988 — and they also made a small gain in the House.
No one can prove these results in 2000 were caused by the events of late 1998, but perhaps one ought to consider the possibility.
Guilty or not guilty, that is not the way justice is supposed to work.
I do agree with this, more or less, but impeachment isn’t only a matter of justice.
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No, it isn’t. Pelosi’s position is more nuanced than that.
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I understand, but most of the public recognized that the Clinton Impeachment charges were really weak. If there is strong evidence of a serious crime, then the President should go to trial.
Laws are meaningless if they are not enforced, but we have seen that we are no longer a nation of laws.
Impeachment seems to be just another Constitutional anachronism.