In my time on this earth, I've seen Republican propaganda turn a decent centrist like Michael Dukakis into a signatory of the Port Huron statement. I've seen it turn a decorated war hero like John Kerry into a Francophone poltroon. I've seen it turn a radical centrist/Rockefeller Republican like Bill Clinton into a dope-smoking refugee from the Monterey Pop Festival. I've seen kindly old Tip O'Neill turned into a Thomas Nast cartoon, and I've seen Barack Obama turned into an Islamic Kenyan holy man. I've seen an audience created for every one of these manufactured creations, and I've seen that audience respond to them as if they had the firmest basis in reality.

So you will pardon me if I'm dubious of the notion that congressional Democrats have to rid themselves of Nancy Pelosi because she was so easily demonized in that Georgia special election. If it wasn't her, it would have been somebody else. To paraphrase the editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, if there's a conflict between the person and the legend, slander the legend.

Steve M is right on the button here. The Republicans have one brand and one brand only: Democrats suck. The articles of their electoral faith begin and end with, how best can they piss off the liberals who rent space in their heads, and how do they convince the rubes that pissing off the liberals is an actual policy prescription to stave off the economic and cultural forces that are keeping the rubes up at night? As Steve points out, you have to dig pretty deep in today's coverage to discover that Karen Handel has no public stance on the vastly unpopular healthcare bill, or that she has no clear opinion on giving gozillionnaires another huge tax cut. (Yeah, I'm pretty sure I know what those opinions are, too.) She ran against a caricature of a non-candidate as a nonentity and she won. Nice work if you can get it.

Which brings us back to Nancy Pelosi. Most of the voices calling for her to go are coming from younger Democrats, a lot of them allied with the Berniecrat wing of the party. (Ironically, the Republicans ran ads tying Jon Ossoff to Sanders, that socialist menace. Plus ca change…) I am charmed to my bones by the faith these young folks have that Pelosi's replacement would be someone dedicated to single-payer healthcare, the $15 minimum wage, and hanging banksters from lamp posts. More than likely, it would be someone like, say, Tim Ryan from Ohio, who talks the salt-o'-the-earth talk about economic anxiety, but who flipped on abortion in 2015, when it became convenient to do so, and who won an NRA endorsement in his first campaign. This development would not be to their liking.

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Moreover, I've yet to see anyone who could wrangle the House caucus in this dark time for Democrats better than Pelosi has. She kept the caucus unanimous against that abomination of a healthcare bill. She's a manifestly better legislative strategist than Paul Ryan. Whether or not she is to blame for the failure of the Democrats to maintain a House majority after 2006 is an impossible question. Legislative leaders' having to bear the brunt of electoral losses beyond their home districts is a fairly flexible standard. If you want to make the case that the age of the Democratic congressional leadership makes the emergence of new faces more difficult, I'll listen to that argument, but leave Bernie Sanders out of it, because you sound like a fool.

If you're proposing to replace Pelosi, prepare for the inevitable result. The pressure on the replacement—from Republicans, certainly, but also from the elite political media—to work "on a bipartisan basis" with the zombie-eyed granny starver and his band of cutthroats, or to find "common ground" with the folks down at Camp Runamuck, is going to be well-nigh overwhelming. And that's not even to mention the both-siderist frenzy that will erupt during the fight to elect a new leader. Dems In Disarray is a Beltway classic. This would be its loudest revival performance in years. And, in any case, if you're demanding that Pelosi be dumped because of her usefulness as a Republican cartoon, aren't you already pretty much admitting defeat?

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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