- Jun 6, 2007
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This writer is an independent Republican so it would be completely understandable if Democrats dismiss the following comments as partisan rhetoric. It would be better for the Democrat Party and the country if Nancy Pelosi took herself out of the running for Speaker of the House both the Democrats and the country would be better served if the current Democrat House caucuse's number two or three, Steny Hoyer or James Clyburn, were selected to fill the role. It is not that Nancy Pelosi is a bad person her character is in the realm of the other two it is that her reputation and her style isn't the best for the job. Because of her tenure as Speaker during the President Obama years to much of the Republican electorate she has the persona of the devil! During that time the central political issue was the Affordable Care Act and although that law did many great things like giving subsidies to lower and middle income Americans enabling them to buy insurance and requiring communal pricing so people with pre-existing conditions could get affordable insurance it was disastrous for America in that it was too generous with the coverage mandates (should have done an incremental approach) an abundance of experts warned these mandates were going to cause skyrocketing insurance premiums and they in fact did. During this time Nancy Pelosi behaved tone deaf on this issue refusing to recognize this shortcoming in the law and in many other ways refused to recognize the overreach in the law uttering her famous line "we have to pass the law so we can learn what's in it"! In matters of style as a leader Nancy Pelosi has a hard edge to her, she is really cutting and that tends to alienate people and incite them to oppose you. An example of this would be her criticism of the 2017 Republican tax law when she said the bonuses the workers were getting from the law were crumbs, her position was right the selling point of the law by the Republicans was that it was going to raise wages and the facts don't bare that out corporate America kept the vast vast majority of the tax cut savings for themselves America's low and middle income workers didn't see their fare share; Ms. Pelosi uttering that biting remark though caused Republicans to latch on to that and fueled partisanship on the issue. The next Speaker to accomplish anything significant is going to have to tact a centrist course and attract bipartisan support and a Speaker candidate who has a proclivity for stabbing her opponents directly in the center of their most sensitive wounds does not have desirable make-up for fulfilling such a role!
