Conservatives use Pelosi as face of liberalism in campaign ads
Washington Post
By Karen Tumulty
July 1, 2010
Beware! Nancy Pelosi is a colossal tax-dollar-engorged monster who ravages small towns and must be brought down by Republican ray guns. Or at least that is what a cartoon version of the House speaker looked like in "Attack of the 50-Foot Pelosi," a television ad that a conservative group called Right Change aired in Pennsylvania last month.
A new Web site by the National Republican Congressional Committee portrays her as a malevolent puppet master, yanking the strings of 10 vulnerable House Democrats.
And a video on the campaign home page of GOP House candidate Harold Johnson of North Carolina makes her sound like someone out of those creepy cable ads for burglar alarms. "If you’re a small-business owner," Johnson says, "you get up every morning and you put your helmet on, because you think that Nancy Pelosi is going to come into your bedroom and hit you over the head with a baseball bat"…
Pelosi [D-CA] has become "the face of liberalism in the Obama era," more so than Obama himself, said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. Her infamy among conservatives is partly the product of her often-imperious manner, a rougher media culture and a superheated political climate. But it is also a backhanded acknowledgment of how effective she has been.
Pelosi has unabashedly wielded the leverage of her office to muscle her agenda through the House. Once dismissed by her opponents – and even some of her fellow Democrats – as a lightweight, she has proved to be "the most powerful speaker we’ve seen in modern history," said political analyst Charlie Cook, whose assessment is shared by a number of congressional scholars.
More questionable is whether making Pelosi the bogeywoman of this year’s congressional elections will help Republicans win back the House…
This is the kind of problem that J. Dennis Hastert, Carl Albert and Frederick Gillett never had to deal with. House speakers, with a few exceptions, have been such colorless legislative insiders that the mention of their names in most of America would have received no reaction beyond quizzical looks. Not this year, and not this speaker. "If you go to almost any grass-roots event and you mention the speaker’s name," said Bill Flores, a Republican who is challenging Rep. Chet Edwards [ D-TX], "you will get a huge response from the audience." Which is why, by Flores’s estimate, he manages to drop Pelosi’s name into his speeches about as often as he does President Obama’s.
Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell [MI] and John P. Murtha [PA]. In a 40-minute interview with Politico, he scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [CA]. in the big spending and energy debates of the year. Murtha “and the other senior leaders … march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.” But his implication was clear: When asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”
It’s almost hard to imagine that any sensible man, particularly a man in a high office, would talk in the explicitly phallic language of an earlier era, "They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected." But, putting aside his attempt to win the "Male Chauvinist Pig" award for the New American Century, these comments give us a picture of the inner workings of Dick Cheney [see, I can do it too]. "…he scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi." It doesn’t even occur to him that Representatives Dingell and Murtha might actually agree with Nancy Pelosi. He can only see them as not exerting their power. For Cheney, it really is all about accruing power and exerting it. His phallic language is not simply a lack of political correctness, it’s what makes him tick…
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