Is Nancy Pelosi the House Majority Leader Again

Final May, The Washington Post's James Hohmann noted "an uncovered dynamic" that helped explain the GOP's failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it outset passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Still none voted for repeal. The "uncovered dynamic," Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi'southward skill at keeping her political party in line.

She's been keeping it in line for more a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his 2d presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For ix months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crunch and offer their own program to modify it. Pelosi refused. Autonomous members of Congress hosted more than than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush's second term never recovered.

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In 2009, Pelosi persuaded arrears-wary Blue Dog Democrats to back Barack Obama's stimulus package, and it passed without a single Republican vote. The following year, when Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff, suggested scaling dorsum health-care reform after the Democrats' surprise Senate loss in Massachusetts, Pelosi insisted that Obama maintain his goal of universal coverage. She enraged her pro-choice allies by allowing a vote on an amendment prohibiting women insured through the constabulary'south health-care exchanges from receiving government-subsidized abortions. But that gave antiabortion Democrats encompass to support the bill, which passed with nary a Republican vote.

These victories led Thomas Isle of mann, who studies Congress at the Brookings Establishment, to call Pelosi the "strongest and nigh constructive speaker of modern times." And even later being relegated to minority leader when Republicans took the House in 2010, she kept winning legislative fights. In the summer of 2015, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Republican Party launched a mammoth lobbying campaign to impale Obama'south nuclear agreement with Iran. Pelosi quickly secured the votes to prevent Republicans from overturning the understanding, thus checkmating the deal's foes.

In addition to being a masterful legislative tactician, the 77-twelvemonth-erstwhile Pelosi is, in Politician's words, "the most successful nonpresidential political fundraiser in U.Southward. history." Nevertheless many of her colleagues want her gone. In November 2016, almost a third of House Democrats voted to depose her as leader. Some other coup attempt erupted final summertime. Why and so much discontent with a adult female who has proved so good at her chore? Maybe because many Democrats call back Pelosi's unpopularity undermines their chances of winning dorsum the House. Why is she so unpopular? Because powerful women politicians usually are. Therein lies the tragedy. Nancy Pelosi does her job about also as anyone could. But because she's a adult female, she may not be doing it well enough.

W ithin days of Pelosi'south ascension to House minority leader, in 2003, back when nearly 60 percent of Americans still had no idea who she was, the Republican Party featured her visage—"garish and twisted," in the words of a magazine article at the time—in an ad confronting a Democrat running for Congress in Louisiana. The GOP has been using her as a scarecrow always since. Earlier the 2010 midterms, the National Republican Congressional Committee cited Pelosi in an amazing 70 percent of its ads—far more than the pct that cited Obama. And for good reason: Internal Republican polling showed that Pelosi was far less pop than the president. Afterward Democrats lost their House majority that autumn, Congressman Allen Boyd of Florida, whose reelection bid failed, called hers "the face that defeated us in this concluding ballot."

In the run-upwardly to the 2012 elections, according to the Wesleyan Media Projection, Republicans invoked Pelosi in television ads vii times every bit often as they invoked the Senate'south Autonomous leader, Harry Reid. Four years afterward that, in the run-upwards to 2016, they invoked her three times as often.

In the Trump era, as Republican vulnerability has mounted, the GOP has targeted Pelosi yet over again. Last summer, when the Democrat Jon Ossoff showed surprising force in a special election for a Business firm seat in Georgia, Republicans responded with millions of dollars in ads tying him to Pelosi. "Say No to Pelosi's Yes Human being," a GOP commercial instructed. One slice of Republican mail depicted a laughing Pelosi maneuvering Ossoff similar a marionette alongside the words "Now She'due south in Command." Another featured Pelosi ripping off an Ossoff mask. When the journalist Michael Tracey traveled through Montana before it held a special House election last May, he was, he wrote on CNBC's website, "struck by the frequency with which folks cited aversion to Pelosi as the reason why they'd backed the Republican."

The Democrats who want Pelosi gone don't deny her talent. But they say her unpopularity is too heavy a load to acquit. "The Republican playbook for the past four election cycles has been very focused, very clear," Representative Kathleen Rice, a Democrat from New York, insisted after Ossoff's defeat. "Information technology's been an set on on our leader. Is it off-white? No. Are the attacks accurate? No. Just guess what? They work." Nonpartisan observers agree. As David Wasserman, an editor of "The Melt Political Report," tweeted after the Georgia loss, "It's just extremely difficult for Ds to argue benefits of Nancy Pelosi's fundraising skills still outweigh price of her presence in GOP ads."

Not everyone agrees that Pelosi's unpopularity is a function of gender. Some observers note that her Republican counterpart, Speaker Paul Ryan, is unpopular too: Co-ordinate to HuffPost'south poll aggregator, Americans disapprove of both Ryan and Pelosi past xx percentage points. But Ryan's unpopularity tracks his party's, which Americans disapprove of past 23 points—whereas Pelosi'south disapproval margin is well-nigh twice that of the Democratic Party as a whole. Others chalk upwardly Pelosi's paradigm problems to her ideology (liberal) and habitation base of operations (San Francisco). But Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a liberal from Brooklyn, has a disapproval margin one-half as large as hers.

One might think grassroots Democratic enthusiasm for Pelosi would offset her lack of entreatment among Republicans and independents. The party, afterwards all, is moving left, where Pelosi has been all along. She opposed Bill Clinton'south attempt to permit China into the World Merchandise Organization; she opposed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, his policy that prevented LGBT Americans from serving openly in the armed forces; she opposed the Republic of iraq War when most of the House Democratic leadership, and almost every Autonomous senator running for president, supported it; and she opposed Obama's push button for the fast-rail merchandise authority necessary to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet a September CNN poll found that Democrats were only 11 points more than probable to view Pelosi favorably than unfavorably.

Gender scholars would not be surprised. For a 2010 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Message, the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto showed study participants the fictional biographies of two state senators, identical except that one was named John Burr and the other Ann Burr. (I referred to this report in an October 2022 article for this magazine called "Fear of a Female President.") When quotations were added that described the state senators as "aggressive" and possessing "a potent will to power," John Burr became more than pop. But the changes provoked "moral outrage" toward Ann Burr, whom both men and women became less willing to support.

Nancy Pelosi, by leading her party in Congress, has become Ann Burr. A woman can serve in Congress without beingness perceived equally overly ambitious. By climbing to the superlative of the greasy pole, however, Pelosi has made her appetite visible. She has gained the ability to tell her male person colleagues what to exercise. (The pollster Celinda Lake notes that most ads attacking Pelosi show her speaking, not listening.) She has put herself, to quote the anti-Ossoff ad, "in control."

For John Burr, this wouldn't be a problem. As the management professors Ekaterina Netchaeva, Maryam Kouchaki, and Leah Sheppard noted in a 2022 paper, Americans more often than not believe "that leaders must necessarily possess attributes such as competitiveness, self-confidence, objectiveness, aggressiveness, and ambitiousness." But "these leader attributes, though welcomed in a male, are inconsistent with prescriptive female stereotypes of warmth and communality." In fact, "the mere indication that a female leader is successful in her position leads to increased ratings of her selfishness, deceitfulness, and coldness."

The more successful Pelosi is—the more she outmaneuvers and dominates her male adversaries—the more than threatening she becomes. And the easier it becomes to tar the male Democratic candidates who would serve under her every bit emasculated yes-men. Which makes it harder for Democrats to retake the House.

Information technology would exist comforting to retrieve that Pelosi is alienating because she's a rich liberal Democrat from San Francisco—not because she'due south a woman. Yet despite attributes that should brand her endearing to cultural conservatives—she is a Catholic Italian American grandmother of nine who entered politics only after staying home to enhance her kids—many Americans greeted her rise with, in the words of the Yale researchers, "contempt, anger, and/or disgust." Information technology was the same for Hillary Clinton: Her deep religiosity, career-long focus on child welfare, and insistence on keeping her family together in the face of near-unimaginable humiliation didn't spare her in the 2022 presidential election.

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Similarly, if Senator Elizabeth Warren seeks the presidency, she won't be able to count on help from her working-form Oklahoma roots and anti–Wall Street passion. On the surface, Trump's "Pocahontas" slur may appear equally unrelated to gender equally Clinton's emails did. But the moral outrage that female person ambition provokes takes many forms. Already, notes Jennifer Lawless, who directs the Women and Politics Institute at American University, Republicans target Warren far more often than they target her populist doppelgänger, Senator Bernie Sanders. Non coincidentally, co-ordinate to HuffPost, Americans approve of Sanders by a margin of 24 points—and of Warren by only 4 points.

A woman will 1 day arrive to the White House. Nancy Pelosi may again become the speaker. But her experience offers an irony and a warning: For women politicians to succeed, they must defeat and outmaneuver men. Nonetheless the better at it they are, the more detested they become.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/

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