For a person whose progressive bona fides should be clear to all, Nancy Pelosi sure takes a lot of heat from progressives online, to the point where many back leadership challenges from people who are far less progressive than she is.
She’s often attacked for being reluctant to call for impeaching Trump. (Apparently good progressives are supposed to stink at being tacticians.) This shouldn’t have to be explained, but here goes:
1. There’s this fella you may have heard of called Mike Pence. He’s basically Trump, except he’s competently evil and he knows enough not to get caught boasting about grabbing, ah, female crotches and shooting people on Fifth Avenue. Pence already runs much of Trump’s White House policy; do you really want him to be running all of it?
2. Independent voters aren’t as leftish as some progressives think they are. They aren’t as enamored with the idea of impeachment as Democrats and progressives are, for one thing, and that’s probably because most indie voters’ experience of impeachment was not the Watergate affair (which happened well before many voters were born and where the president’s people were clearly the bad guys), but the slow-motion and grotesquely politicized coup attempt that was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which process was set in motion almost as soon as he was sworn in.
Yet while independent voters aren’t that fond of impeachment, they do want to see some checks put on Trump, and realize that the current slate of Capitol Hill Republicans are unwilling to put any checks at all on the man. They therefore favor voting for Democrats nearly as much as do Democratic voters.
People need to think about all of this before they go down the “Let’s Bash Pelosi” path.