They had her. They really did.
There was blood in the water and the GOP sharks were circling Nancy Pelosi, snapping at her as they edged closer and closer. It was only a matter of time, and the GOP could claim a major victory - the scalp of the Speaker of the House.
And then it was gone.
Like the air going out of a balloon, the GOP effort to sink Pelosi was deflating, largely because of their own ineptitude. The president delivered the coup de grace with his Sonia Sotomayor nomination. The momentum switched back to the Democrats. The beltway media, a pack of lemmings at the best of time, were on to the next story. The GOP was in disarray once again.
Same old, same old.
Now, I'm not the biggest Nancy Pelosi fan in the world. I think the
statement she made about the CIA lying to her about waterboarding
detainees smacked of a desperate politician trying to manipulate her
way out of a debacle of her own making. And for my taste, she's a bit too interested
in being speaker, and not enough in doing what's best for the country.
But more than any other incident that we've seen since the Democrats assumed control of the legislative and executive branches of the government, this one illustrates just how leaderless the Republicans are. Not that Rep. John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor aren't trying. But in a party where everyone thinks they are the leader, it's hard to march to the beat of only one drummer.
You could feel the tide going out over the weekend. First, media reports started to circulate that the GOP had overplayed its hand. Newt Gingrich called for her ouster (which, in a Democratic-controlled house, was never going to happen), and then former VP Dick Cheney, who had no business in this argument, took a few jabs at her. It started to become a lot easier for the Democrats to portray this as a partisan attack, moving the spotlight away from what Pelosi had actually said.
"The best thing for anyone, let alone Nancy Pelosi, is to be the
subject of a petty, venal, absurd attack by Newt Gingrich," said Rep.
Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.). "He’s the gift that keeps on giving."
Meanwhile Boehner was trying to slow down his colleagues. He believed, and I agreed with him, that if Republicans started calling for her removal before they had actually investigated her CIA claims, the opportunity would be lost.
As Andie Coller wrote in Politico:
"The wisdom of equating the first woman speaker of the House with a
character whose first name also happens to be among the most vulgar
terms for a part of the female anatomy might be debated – if the RNC were willing to do so, which it was not. An RNC spokesperson refused
repeated requests by POLITICO to explain the point of the video, or the
intended connection between Pelosi and Galore.
"But what isn’t open to debate is that the waterboarding conflict has
been accompanied by a cascade of attacks on the speaker, not as a
leader or a legislator, but as a woman."
Which is, of course, a recipe for Republican disaster. By focusing on the speaker's gender, instead of her mistake, the RNC and the mouths-that-roared on talk radio only further succeeded in undermining Boehner's plan of attack.
Even GOP members of Congress were outraged by the Galore comparison.
"I thought it was reprehensible, irresponsible and unpersuasive," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told Politico. "If we're going to regain the credibility of the American people, we're
going to have to stop with silly antics like that. It may get a snide
chuckle inside the Beltway, but it offends most people. We have to get away from the politics of personal destruction," he said of the video.
(Tell that to Rush, OK?)
Then on Sunday, Sen. Dick Durbin, who was debating Gingrich about the Pelosi statement on Meet The Press, reminded Gingrich that he himself had said that the CIA had "damaged our national security and misled the American people" over the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran in 2007. And he also reminded the former speaker that another GOP member in 2008 had accused the CIA of lying about an earlier report. Gingrich defended both statements, exactly what the Democrats wanted in their effort to paint the attacks on Pelosi as just another partisan effort by the Republicans.
Then over the weekend, news started to leak about Sotomayor, and Pelosi was gone. Any hopes the GOP had of undermining the speaker's authority had vanished. It was a genius political move by Obama - he took the heat off of Pelosi, thus earning an IOU from her, and threw the Republicans into confusion about how to attack Sotomayor - yet another example of too many leaders of the GOP.
Oh, they still might try to get at Pelosi. But it's too late. I've lived in DC long enough to know that the media is always looking for "the next big thing" to report on. Pelosi is, sadly for the GOP, old news. Newt is left sputtering, the RNC has egg on its face, and poor John Boenher has a massive migraine.
I hope he has a lot of Tylenol. I think his headaches are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
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