In the aftermath of the election, the circular firing squad within the Democratic Party has dominated this week's news. As with any disaster, blaming those who are not responsible is a given -- and the pack mentality begins.
One of the folks targeted during and after the election is the highest ranking woman ever in the history of the U.S. Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Some political pundits have completely missed the mark regarding the importance of Pelosi, both in policy and political terms. In short, she has been one of the most effective speakers in the history of the House of Representatives, and remains the most important national leader for women -- and we need her in leadership. And for the Democrats to win in 2012, they are going to need women more than ever.
One of the many --and most important -- accomplishments of Speaker Pelosi was the passage, despite all odds, of historic health care reform. She pulled together a disparate and wide-ranging Democratic caucus, and convinced her colleagues to support a bill that was not what they wanted. Anyone who followed the travails of the health care bill knows it would never have passed without her leadership.
But not only did she pass the bill: she demanded that the bill protect and advance the health care needs of women. It makes a difference to have a speaker who is not only a policy expert and extraordinary consensus builder, but also a mother of five and grandmother of eight. Nancy Pelosi understands women's health issues in a deeply personal way -- and when she stands for women, it matters. Under the new health care law, women will no longer face gender bias in health insurance premiums; women won't be barred from insurance because of preexisting conditions such as pregnancy; and women's preventive health care will be covered by all insurance plans, so women will no longer be asked to shell out for co-pays.
And in the fight to defeat the effort by Congressman Bart Stupak to eliminate insurance coverage for abortion care, Speaker Pelosi refused to budge. Women need her now more than ever to protect their gains from those who are anxious to roll back health care and undermine their rights under the law.
It's pretty clear that the new majority in the House won't be putting women in leadership positions. Speaker Boehner himself is of another era when it comes to women's health and rights. Women are going to be looking to Ms. Pelosi to advocate for our best interests, particularly in this new Congress.
As a leader, Nancy Pelosi matters not just in policy terms, but also in political terms. Any analysis of the 2010 election shows that Democrats who won in tough races did so because of an outsized gender gap. Democrats lost women voters overall by one point, but women made the difference in key races: Senator Bennett won reelection with a 17 point gender gap; Senator Murray won with a 12 point gender gap; Senator Boxer with 16 points; and in one of the last races to be called, Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon was reelected by women -- who provided a gender gap of 26 points.
It's notable that women voted for these candidates so overwhelmingly because they knew the difference between the candidates when it came to women's health and rights. After all the ads on jobs and taxes, the winning candidates brought women over by publicly campaigning on the issue of reproductive choice and women's health. Through paid television ads and mailings, winning Democratic candidates made clear that they stood for women's reproductive rights and that their opponents did not. Even Senator Harry Reid, who is not pro-choice, ran ads about the extreme record of his opponent on abortion rights -- and he ended up with an 11 point gender gap. It's not hard to figure out. In close races, women pay close attention to who stands for them.
If the Democrats are serious about winning in 2012, they need to pay attention to women -- as voters and as leaders. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stood for us, and we stand for her.
Cecile Richards is President of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
Follow Cecile Richards on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cecilerichards
Remember how the right treated Hillary Clinton? Yet she did not quietly go away. Her presence and influence obviously has not harmed the Democratic Party who won big in 2008. The right no longer bash Hillary Clinton, because they moved on to another powerful woman target. And they will again if they don't have Pelosi, or maybe even if they do. Bullies sometimes get tired and move on just for the sake of novelty. If the Democratic Party is prepared to tell 53% of the population to sit down and be quiet to appease the likes of Rush Limbaugh and whoever has replaced Jerry Falwell, we will leave in droves.
Also, she pushed hard for bailing out corrupt and poorly run Wall St firms.
For these, she deserves contempt.
Can you please list out what facts she has distorted and provide links to the truth?
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Ice cream salesmen have a conflict of interest too, but that doesn't mean they are fibbing when they tell you ice cream is tasty.
You can add dorktv on twitter though, that is me.
The seats that were lost were almost all blue dog seats. The blue dog caucus lost almost half its members while the progressive caucus went from 83 to 80, losing only 3 seats. Many of the almost two dozen bad dogs that got the boot ran aggressive campaigns where they talked about how they "stood up to Pelosi". And their claims were true. They were fractious and uncooperative and Pelosi frequently passed bills with a lot of **republican** support to get around them.
That's right. There are currently over 60 bills waiting for Reid in the Senate to get off his butt and review that were passed in the house with at least 50 republican votes. Some with many more than that. Pelosi is the ONLY democratic leader we have right now that is successfully working in a nonpartisan fashion.
So you want to throw out the only leader we have with an solid track record of effectively working with republican legislators? Something that is even more important now? And you want to do it even though we have just conclusively proved through experimentation that bashing Pelosi DOESN'T win seats? That if anything it demoralizes the democratic voters because they *like* Pelosi's policies and if you don't support the policies they like they won't get the vote out for you?
It's a common political practice to slam the opposition party's leaders, so don't be too swayed by the media spin. The very fact that so much of the GOP's effort went into negative advertising targeting Speaker Pelosi indicates how effective her leadership has actually been. We need more coalition builders, compassionate and effective legislators, and forward thinkers, just like Speaker Pelosi.
You do realize that the GOP spin machine will manufacture this same hatred of someone on the Dem side no matter what we do or don't do right? Remove Nancy and they'll focus on Obama while casting around for a new back up boogey man to stoke the fires of irrational hate against for when obama goes down.
So we don't actually gain anything by giving in. We just encourage them to continue being drama queens because the strategy works. If anything, the fact that they are focusing so hard on the #3 slot instead of going for the President or the Senate majority leader is telling. And when you look at her vast body of legislative accomplishment you can see clearly why they are so afraid of her.
Ignore pundits and major networks and go to archives and c-span and look at what shes actually done. Her work speaks for itself and is great. It isn't her fault Reid fumbled many of her greatest bills. If anything, it is Reid we need to replace. The man is utterly ineffectual.
Which is why the GOP doesn't waste its manufactured outrage on him. They like him in a leadership position because he is ineffective.
yeah ...
So, you trolling or do you honestly not understand what feminism is about?
What a load of crap.
Nancy Pelosi is yesterdays politician - thank God. Why do the party regulars - of both parties - believe that these old war horses are the right people for today?
I mean, the repubs actually ran Bob Dole for president. Bob Dole ... the poster child for erectile dysfunction. Now the dems want to keep the Princess of Botox around.
These sorts of people have been running the show for decades. They are a good part of the REASON the country is so screwed up.
Time to get these old war horses out to pasture and put in new people, get rid of the locked in advantages of the seniority system that force us to send the same worthless bastards back to Congress time and time again in order to have people representing us that have real power, and let some new people actually handle the reins of Congress who aren't tainted by ten years of being seduced by the system.
It would have to be better than the present system.
The key word is leader. It should not matter if a leader is male or female, white or black, atheist or devout believer, gay or straight, union member or CEO. The real question is not whether Nancy is good just for women but for us all. The voters in her district say yes, but according to polls, everyone else not so much.
0.0 percent- that's a good one. I'll tell it to my kids.
Don't know where you live, but I've probably been there. Most communities in the heartland do far less for their kids than the City and people of San Francisco do for ours.
And by "looney fringe in SF" she means a bunch of great parents whose children have an 84% high school graduation rate ( the state of texas, in contrast, is 61.3% ) and are nearly twice as likely on average to attain a bachelors degree than the rest of the country.
Not to mention her 5 children and umpteen grandchildren. Just cause someone doesn't wave their babies in front of the camera as a prop doesn't mean they aren't a loving mother.
In fact, I'd argue that NOT thrusting your children into the national discourse to boost your popularity is the mature, wise, and loving path.
http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/house/california/8
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--------------------------------- District --------- US
High school graduate ----- 83.8% -------- 84.5%
Bachelor's degree or higher -- 49.1% ---- 27.4%
Age -------------District --------------- U.S.
Under 18 ------ 14.1% -------------- 24.5%
65 and older -- 14.0% ------------- 12.6%
Source: Census Bureau
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http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2010/feb/05/bill-white/texas-has-43rd-best-graduation-rate-united-states/
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The fact book also ranks Texas' estimated public high school graduation rate for 2009 — 43rd, with 61.3 percent of students who were enrolled in ninth grade graduating.
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Surely, this is not what women should be thinking they must be like in this day and age. Heaven help us, if that's the case.
That's just the botox. Underneath that unmoving exterior she'd probably almost human.
Especially after having 5 (FIVE) children! Yow. Not many women can get their figure back after that.
The people you insist on comparing Pelosi to had bad ratings because of things they DID. Newt's government shut down was an unmitigated disaster. It showed the entire country that he was a more interested in drama and bluster than in serving the country.
If ANYONE in the democratic leadership these days can be compared to Newt it is Reid for allowing the senate to grind to a halt. Not once has Reid called a filibuster bluff from the republican side, rolled in the cots, turned on the camera's, and let the GOP hang themselves for wasting government time. He allowed a virtual government shut down in the senate which has been crippling to the last two years and has prevented a lot of Nancy's good work from reaching Obama's desk.
She got them because she did a damn good job and make no mistake, the Republicans knew it.
I've had skin cancer twice. TWICE. My total bill? Slightly under $1,500.00 That is less than two grand.
Why?
Because I know I'm high risk for this. I'm very fair skinned and lots of people in my family have had it. So once a year I go in to a dermatologist who looks me over and when she sees something dodgy we cut it off and have it biopsied. Twice the result of the biopsy has been cancer. But because it was cut out before it spread it was removed cleanly and cheaply.
1.5K worth of prevention saved my insurance hundreds of thousands in cure. Times two if I'd survived the first round of hospitalization and chemo and lived to get it again.
Why do copays exist? They were proposed initially to prevent hypochondriacs from overloading the system with fictitious ailments by making them put "some skin in the game" every time they came in. But in reality making the time to get to the Doctor's office is sufficient "skin in the game" and adding cost on top of it is simply to much for poor families.
As a result of copays, people are getting less cheap preventative care and more expensive emergency care. Preventative care, emergency care, and reproductive care should all be copay exempt. Pregnancy and injury are not things hypochondriacs imagine.
While I am happy for you that you have had successful medical treatment (in the USA with what the left so often tell us is a crappy system no less), the point remains that medical care is expensive. If YOU don't pay for your treatment or copays or whatever, SOMEONE is paying for YOU.
Really?
What is wrong with people paying their OWN darned copays for preventative screenings?
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They do. It's called their premium.
Your philosophy is expensive and ineffective because you are refusing to acknowledge human nature. People, particularly people who have never had a significant medical problem before, systemically underestimate their own vulnerability. It can't, after all, happen to me.
Why pay $25.00 and miss out on some payable hours at work for a procedure that tests for something that isn't going to happen to you? Especially if money is tight.
Hindsight is, of course, 20/20 but people don't make the decision to forgo preventative care in hindsight. And foresight is notoriously short sighted.
I don't care about approaches that work great if and only if everyone behaves a certain way. In the real world that doesn't happen so we need approaches that acknowledge this. One method of doing this is adding incentives to a system for desired behavior. Copays for preventative care, meanwhile, are *penalties* for doing the right thing!
Absolutely idiotic from a policy perspective.