Squabbling Dems next challenge for Madame Speaker
NANCY Pelosi may have won her war with Donald Trump.
But now the 80-year-old Speaker of the House of Representatives — an incredibly important role in US politics — has a new challenge that could prove much tougher than the former president.
“I think this is going to be her toughest test yet,” Michael Hardaway, a former spokesman for the Democrats, reportedly said.
“You’re going to have the progressives versus the moderates on nearly every bill. It’s going to be tough for her to get anything done, but here’s the thing: If anyone can do this, it’s Nancy Pelosi,” Hardaway told USA Today.
After so many years in “the swamp”, she now finds herself cast as a “left-wing socialist” by the conservatives and “she is certainly not as far left as some on the left would like her to be”, says Pelosi biographer and Time magazine writer Molly Ball.
Yet at the same time, some of the younger cohort within her own party, who see her as a pragmatic deal maker happy to cozy up to Republicans rather than a frothing ideologue, say enough is enough.
“I mean, I think so,” said firebrand Democratic left-winger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 31, de facto leader of the so-called
Squad, a handful of assertive and demanding young progressives, when asked if it was time for Pelosi “to go”?
“I do think that we need new leadership in the Democratic Party. Absolutely. But how do we ensure that when we shift we don’t even move further to the right?”
The pressure on Pelosi rose after the Democrats lost a dozen seats at the 2020 election and failed to unseat one Republican.
It will take all of Pelosi’s guile and smarts to make sure she can deliver the numbers for Joe Biden as he tries to roll out his agenda, which is also under pressure from the hard left who accepted him as candidate when Bernie Sanders withdrew.
Left-wing Vox.com journalist Sean Illing said: “The truth is that Pelosi is a bit of an enigma. For all her fame, we don’t really know that much about how she sees the world.”