Did Pelosi Say Sign It So We Can Read It
The Nancy Pelosi Problem
The first female person speaker of the House has become the most effective congressional leader of modern times—and, not coincidentally, the most vilified.
Last May, The Washington Post'due south James Hohmann noted "an uncovered dynamic" that helped explain the GOP'south failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it kickoff passed. Twelve Autonomous Firm members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Nonetheless none voted for repeal. The "uncovered dynamic," Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi's skill at keeping her party in line.
She'southward been keeping it in line for more than than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush-league launched his second presidential term with an ambitious button to partially privatize Social Security. For ix months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crunch and offering their own program to alter it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed downward, and Bush's 2nd term never recovered.
In 2009, Pelosi persuaded deficit-wary Bluish Dog Democrats to back Barack Obama's stimulus package, and it passed without a single Republican vote. The following twelvemonth, when Rahm Emanuel, so the White House primary of staff, suggested scaling back wellness-intendance reform afterwards the Democrats' surprise Senate loss in Massachusetts, Pelosi insisted that Obama maintain his goal of universal coverage. She enraged her pro-option allies past allowing a vote on an amendment prohibiting women insured through the law'due south wellness-care exchanges from receiving authorities-subsidized abortions. Only that gave antiabortion Democrats encompass to support the nib, which passed with nary a Republican vote.
These victories led Thomas Isle of mann, who studies Congress at the Brookings Institution, to call Pelosi the "strongest and well-nigh 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. In the summer of 2015, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Republican Party launched a mammoth lobbying entrada to kill Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran. Pelosi quickly secured the votes to prevent Republicans from overturning the agreement, thus checkmating the deal's foes.
In improver to being a masterful legislative tactician, the 77-year-old Pelosi is, in Politico'southward words, "the most successful nonpresidential political fundraiser in U.South. history." Yet many of her colleagues desire her gone. In November 2016, virtually a third of House Democrats voted to depose her as leader. Another coup endeavour erupted concluding summer. Why and then much discontent with a woman who has proved so good at her task? Perchance considering many Democrats think Pelosi'due south unpopularity undermines their chances of winning back the House. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians commonly are. Therein lies the tragedy. Nancy Pelosi does her job about every bit well as anyone could. Merely because she'southward a woman, she may not be doing it well enough.
West ithin days of Pelosi's rise to House minority leader, in 2003, back when nearly 60 percent of Americans still had no idea who she was, the Republican Political 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. The GOP has been using her as a scarecrow always since. Before the 2010 midterms, the National Republican Congressional Committee cited Pelosi in an astonishing lxx percent of its ads—far more than the per centum that cited Obama. And for good reason: Internal Republican polling showed that Pelosi was far less pop than the president. After Democrats lost their House bulk that fall, Congressman Allen Boyd of Florida, whose reelection bid failed, chosen hers "the face that defeated us in this last election."
In the run-upwardly to the 2012 elections, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, Republicans invoked Pelosi in television ads seven times as oft as they invoked the Senate'due south Democratic leader, Harry Reid. 4 years subsequently that, in the run-up to 2016, they invoked her iii times equally oft.
In the Trump era, as Republican vulnerability has mounted, the GOP has targeted Pelosi yet again. Last summer, when the Democrat Jon Ossoff showed surprising forcefulness in a special election for a Firm seat in Georgia, Republicans responded with millions of dollars in ads tying him to Pelosi. "Say No to Pelosi's Yes Man," a GOP commercial instructed. 1 piece of Republican mail depicted a laughing Pelosi maneuvering Ossoff similar a marionette alongside the words "Now She's in Control." Another featured Pelosi ripping off an Ossoff mask. When the announcer Michael Tracey traveled through Montana before it held a special House ballot last May, he was, he wrote on CNBC'southward website, "struck by the frequency with which folks cited aversion to Pelosi as the reason why they'd backed the Republican."
The Democrats who want Pelosi gone don't deny her talent. But they say her unpopularity is too heavy a load to bear. "The Republican playbook for the past four election cycles has been very focused, very clear," Representative Kathleen Rice, a Democrat from New York, insisted afterward Ossoff's defeat. "Information technology's been an attack on our leader. Is it fair? No. Are the attacks authentic? No. But approximate what? They work." Nonpartisan observers agree. As David Wasserman, an editor of "The Melt Political Written report," tweeted later on the Georgia loss, "It's just extremely difficult for Ds to argue benefits of Nancy Pelosi'south fundraising skills nonetheless outweigh cost of her presence in GOP ads."
Non everyone agrees that Pelosi's unpopularity is a role of gender. Some observers note that her Republican counterpart, Speaker Paul Ryan, is unpopular too: According to HuffPost'southward poll aggregator, Americans disapprove of both Ryan and Pelosi past 20 pct points. But Ryan'due south unpopularity tracks his political party's, which Americans disapprove of by 23 points—whereas Pelosi'southward disapproval margin is almost twice that of the Democratic Political party equally a whole. Others chalk upward Pelosi'due south image bug to her ideology (liberal) and home base (San Francisco). Merely Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a liberal from Brooklyn, has a disapproval margin half equally large as hers.
One might think grassroots Democratic enthusiasm for Pelosi would offset her lack of entreatment among Republicans and independents. The political party, after all, is moving left, where Pelosi has been all along. She opposed Neb Clinton's endeavour to allow Mainland china into the World Trade Organization; she opposed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, his policy that prevented LGBT Americans from serving openly in the armed forces; she opposed the Iraq State of war when most of the House Democratic leadership, and almost every Democratic senator running for president, supported it; and she opposed Obama'due south push for the fast-track merchandise authority necessary to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Withal a September CNN poll establish that Democrats were but 11 points more likely to view Pelosi favorably than unfavorably.
Gender scholars would not exist surprised. For a 2010 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto showed study participants the fictional biographies of 2 land senators, identical except that one was named John Burr and the other Ann Burr. (I referred to this report in an October 2016 article for this magazine called "Fright of a Female President.") When quotations were added that described the state senators as "ambitious" and possessing "a strong volition to ability," John Burr became more pop. Merely the changes provoked "moral outrage" toward Ann Burr, whom both men and women became less willing to support.
Nancy Pelosi, by leading her party in Congress, has become Ann Burr. A woman tin serve in Congress without existence perceived as overly ambitious. By climbing to the top of the greasy pole, however, Pelosi has made her ambition visible. She has gained the power to tell her male colleagues what to practise. (The pollster Celinda Lake notes that nigh ads attacking Pelosi evidence her speaking, non listening.) She has put herself, to quote the anti-Ossoff advertisement, "in control."
For John Burr, this wouldn't be a problem. Every bit the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2015 paper, Americans generally believe "that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such every bit competitiveness, cocky-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness." Simply "these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male person, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality." In fact, "the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness."
The more successful Pelosi is—the more she outmaneuvers and dominates her male adversaries—the more threatening she becomes. And the easier information technology becomes to tar the male Democratic candidates who would serve under her equally emasculated yes-men. Which makes it harder for Democrats to retake the Firm.
It would be comforting to call up that Pelosi is alienating because she's a rich liberal Democrat from San Francisco—non because she'south a adult female. Yet despite attributes that should make her endearing to cultural conservatives—she is a Catholic Italian American grandmother of nine who entered politics only after staying home to raise her kids—many Americans greeted her rise with, in the words of the Yale researchers, "antipathy, anger, and/or cloy." Information technology was the same for Hillary Clinton: Her deep religiosity, career-long focus on child welfare, and insistence on keeping her family together in the face of near-unimaginable humiliation didn't spare her in the 2016 presidential election.
Similarly, if Senator Elizabeth Warren seeks the presidency, she won't be able to count on help from her working-grade Oklahoma roots and anti–Wall Street passion. On the surface, Trump'southward "Pocahontas" slur may appear as unrelated to gender equally Clinton's emails did. But the moral outrage that female ambition provokes takes many forms. Already, notes Jennifer Lawless, who directs the Women and Politics Institute at American University, Republicans target Warren far more than frequently than they target her populist doppelgänger, Senator Bernie Sanders. Non coincidentally, co-ordinate to HuffPost, Americans approve of Sanders by a margin of 24 points—and of Warren by only four points.
A woman volition i day make it to the White House. Nancy Pelosi may once more get the speaker. But her experience offers an irony and a warning: For women politicians to succeed, they must defeat and outmaneuver men. Yet the better at it they are, the more detested they get.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/
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