In the wake of Nancy Pelosi's success in getting health insurance reform through Congress, pundits still can't resist punching phantom hippies. Today's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup featured a column by Jamie Stiehm that perfectly encapsulates this moronic narrative. It explains Pelosi's success by focusing on her Baltimore political machine roots in contrast to the "latte sipping" "effite" San Francisco district that elected her.
Maybe the focus on San Francisco being "effete" and "latte sipping" is just ignorance. or homophobic or both. (And even if homophobic, wrong, since Harvey Milk built his own effective political machine.)
But it's offensively wrong, if just for its stupidity about a city I love.
Stiehm and her ilk ignore the fact that in the days Nancy Pelosi was growing up in Baltimore, San Francisco was governed by ethnic Democratic machines. A famous part of San Francisco, sometimes called, "North Beach" is also known as "Little Italy." As in New York, San Francisco's major Italian neighborhood sat right next to, you guessed it, Chinatown.
Latte is an Italian drink.
The San Francisco of Nancy Pelosi's youth was the busiest port in the world and produced with Seattle one of the only two general strikes ever in the United States.
And contrary to Stiehm's idiocy, Nancy Pelosi came of age politically in the warm embrace of the machine politics of the incomparable Phil Burton, her predecessor in representing California's Fifth Congressional District.
Burton passed scads of effective, generally liberal, legislation and almost became Speaker of the House himself. Burton's first question about any legislator was, "Is he operational?" This meant, "Did he get things done or just posture?" Burton was decidedly the former and would have curled his lip in scorn at Dennis Kucinich (who hails from gritty, ethnic, working class, Cleveland).
Burton's machine produced not just Nancy Pelosi, but Barbara Boxer, Burton's brother, John Burton and, to a lesser extent, Howard Berman and Henry Waxman.
Perhaps Burton's most accomplished protege was long time California Assembly Speaker, Willie Brown, a legislator so accomplished that when Republicans gained a majority in the Assembly, Brown managed to convince enough Republicans to vote for him so that he remained Speaker of the Assembly.
These were the San Francisco pols Nancy Pelosi interacted with during her adult political life. They were not latte sipping effete ineffectives, as Stiehm's idiotic narrative portrays them. Burton's favorite in-District restaurant was "The House of Prime Rib" and his (much too) favorite drink, the Martini (named after nearby, Martinez, CA).
Nancy Pelosi's adult political colleagues reflected the tough, pragmatic old, old ethnic city that San Francisco is.
And the larger than life statue of Phil Burton that graces the lawn at Fort Mason has a fragment of a note protruding from the bronze jacket pocket. The note reads, "How do you deal with exploiters? You terrorize the bastards."