For those of you who might dismiss the news that Cindy Sheehan may run against Nancy Pelosi in CA-08 as pipe-dreaming or whatever, please allow me to persuade you to change your mind about that.
Sheehan would be a formidable threat to Madam Speaker in this District.
Make the leap (cognitively as well as with your mouse) to consider the evidence.
This was almost a comment in this diary, but it got too big, and I realized it might be a different enough perspective, to warrant its own diary.
Anyone who thinks Sheehan wouldn't have a chance against Pelosi, ought to get to know the voters of CA-08 better. Just look-- east side (mostly) of S.F.! It's San Francisco, minus well over half it's 10% Rethug base (the west side is homeowner-land, the east side does a lot of renting &c.)
Here, unlike in most of the rest of the country, threats to incumbents typically emerge from the left, not the right.
Why, take our last mayoral election (Nov. 2003, runoff in Dec. 2003). Here are the results from the Dec. runoff between the top two from November:
GAVIN NEWSOM. . . . . . . . . . 133,546 52.81
MATT GONZALEZ . . . . . . . . . 119,329 47.19
Matt Gonzalez was the President of the S.F. Board of Supervisors, making him (if memory serves) the highest-ranking elected Green Party official in California history, and maybe in the nation.
Obviously, the GP thing is controversial. If he had run as an independent, he might have done even better... as the registration numbers (in this diary) suggest.
Before people start throwing donuts at me as a Green-apologist (what's the green equivalent of a pinko?), let's consider what effect this very close race had on the incoming Democratic (of course, this is S.F.) mayor, Gavin Newsom.
Unlike Willie Brown, who played hard to the right in local politics (in the local context, all things being relative-- i.e. "downtown" interests served at expense of "neighborhoods"), instead Newsom almost immediately held mass gay weddings at City Hall, winning many hearts and minds both for doing so and for not backing down when things got hot. While nationally, Dems kept their distance from our therefore-tainted mayor (because 2004 was the "values vote" election, remember?), locally, no one will run against him this year, despite various personal scandals and a widespread perception that he hasn't done much to fix chronic problems like the transit system.
In short, people love him. He ran from the right but has kept leaning left. That's how you get elected (and re-elected) in this town.
Obviously, this strategy won't work in a red state. But where your state is deep blue, are these kinds of challenges from the left not a good way to goad the elected into continuing to represent their progressive constituencies after the election? (Because, apparently, all our fundraising only gets us so far.)
I suggest that the city and county of S.F. empirically shows there's something to the notion.
And Cindy Sheehan may well be on to that something.
Why should Pelosi actually stay progressive when she's at 80% in unchallenged elections? Given her current position, and the pinko-baiting she endured in ascending to it, it only makes sense that she'd play hard to the um "center," to the continued chagrin of many fine people at this site.
A "run for her money" might be just the thing. Tens of thousands of S.F. citizens just might agree. I'll bet she notices.
For Extra Credit Fun, dig around in SF Board of Elections returns, and find your favorite examples of how far left S.F. votes!
Update 1: Removed inaccurate par. near end stating part of CA-08 is in Marin. It's not, as linked above-- the district is most of S.F., minus some of its most conservative neighborhoods.