By Dan McLaughlin
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Members of political parties have an obligation to be team players. That obligation shouldn’t
be unlimited, but people who make their way to the position of leading a
legislative caucus have typically internalized the idea of putting the team
first to a point where they have to say things with a straight face that would
impinge deeply on the self-respect of normal humans. It takes a lot to
get someone like Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer,
Hakeem Jeffries, or Paul Ryan to speak ill of other leaders of their own party
with more than the gentlest rebukes.
So it is telling that Pelosi sounded as if she were getting a tooth pulled when
Anderson Cooper of CNN — hardly a hostile questioner — tried to pin her down on
whether Kamala Harris is the best person to be Joe Biden’s vice president and
2024 running mate:
“He thinks so, and that’s what
matters,” Pelosi responded. That prompted Cooper to press Pelosi on whether she
“thought so.” Pelosi again declined to say if she thought Harris was Biden’s
best running mate, but instead pivoted, calling the vice president “very
politically astute.” “I don’t think people give her enough credit,” Pelosi
said. “People don’t understand, she’s politically astute. Why would she be vice
president if she were not?”
Pelosi only mustered a lukewarm
response to Cooper’s question. “She’s the vice president of the United States.
So, when people say to me, ‘Well, why isn’t she doing this or that?’ I said,
because she’s the vice president.” “That’s the job description. You don’t do
that much. You know?”
“She must be good at the job or she wouldn’t have the
job” is about the faintest praise it is possible to muster. If Pelosi were
younger, one might be tempted to attribute this to the sorts of jealousies that
frequently arise among major figures who share the same state party and the
same city, but Pelosi’s been in Washington since 1986, and had already risen to
speaker of the House eight years before Harris was first elected to the Senate,
when Pelosi was in her mid 70s. Pelosi has never been under serious
consideration for any major office outside the House; being speaker was her
highest ambition. So, while Pelosi may well have reasons to dislike or disdain
Harris that derive from things Pelosi knows from San Francisco politics, it is
unlikely that she has ever seen her as a rival. There was an earlier time when
Pelosi went out of her way to aid Harris’s rise in politics, endorsing her in
the 2010 Democratic primary for California attorney general and putting her
name on a profile of Harris in the TIME 100 in
2013. (Granted, when you read that profile today, it is notably unspecific in
attributing to Harris any virtues.)
In short, if Nancy Pelosi is unenthused about Kamala
Harris today, it is likely as a result of having seen her in action since her
arrival in Washington, her 2019 presidential campaign, and her service as vice
president. At Pelosi’s age, with her now being unburdened of caucus leadership,
she no longer feels the need to muster more enthusiasm than the barest minimum.
That barest minimum is what she gave Anderson’s audience. Praise so faint is
damning indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment