Democrats’ S.F. rally champions women’s issues
Three Democratic congresswomen took aim at President Trump on Tuesday, arguing that the country must display a new, stronger concern for women’s needs to meet the nation’s challenges.
“When women succeed, the country succeeds,” San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi told a mostly female crowd of about 100 people gathered at the Brannan Street Wharf for the event celebrating Women’s Equality Day, which is Saturday.
Pelosi was joined by
Reps. Barbara Lee of Oakland and Jackie Speier of Hillsborough, along with a half-dozen women who talked about their concerns in today’s economy.
Kristin Chaset, for example, spoke about what the Affordable Care Act has meant for her family and her 2-year-old daughter, Megan, who was born with a serious heart condition and has piled up “tens of millions” of dollars in medical bills in her short life.
State and federal programs like the ACA have kept her daughter alive and her family financially secure, Chaset said, but there are no guarantees that will continue, given the Republican assault on former President Barack Obama’s health care law.
“I will not wait for the other shoe to drop,” she said.
Other women talked about the need for expanded family leave, day care improvements and more support for womenand minority-owned small businesses.
Those businesses are “the fastest-growing element of our economy,” Pelosi said. “This is not just about their personal stories but about what’s making us even stronger. We need to recognize what these women do for this country in every single way.”
Women’s Equality Day celebrates the signing of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which permitted women to vote.
“The headlines then all said that women were given the right to vote,” Pelosi said. “No such thing,” since the suffragists and other women weren’t given anything. They worked for decades, sometimes even going to jail, to get that amendment passed.
But it was more than a right to vote for women, she added. It was a right for them to help make a better country.
“We need to show a connection between what’s happening at the ballot box and what’s happening in people’s lives,” Pelosi added.
There was politics aplenty as the congresswomen and others spoke with the San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge in the background. That call for “a better deal” for women is the populist slogan that Democrats hope will enable them to take back Congress in 2018 and defeat Trump in 2020.
Speier, for example, talked about how Trump has backed away from his promises to save jobs in the United States and how the president continues to push for a handful of jobs in the coal industry while ignoring the many more jobs in the growing renewableenergy sector.
The Democrats’ better deal would provide women, and everyone else in the country, with security in health care, jobs, wages and international affairs that they don’t have now, she said.
Pelosi and other Democratic leaders introduced their “better deal” plan in July, pitching it as an effort to respond to the concerns of blue-collar, middle-class people who deserted the Democrats to vote for Trump in November.
The plan calls for the creation of millions of goodpaying jobs and higher wages for American workers. The Democrats also say they will help Americans get the skills they need for the changing economy and cut costs for families by reducing the price of prescription drugs, lowering the cost of college and cracking down on business monopolies they say keep prices high for consumers.
The problem, though, as Republicans and many progressive Democrats argue, is that that plan isn’t much different from what the party has promised for decades, with mixed success. It may not be the game changer that’s needed to restructure the country’s political landscape.
That’s not the case, Pelosi said, arguing that the Democrats are calling for an end to what she said was the Republicans’ “trickle down” plan of backing big business.
“This is much stronger” than Democratic programs of the past, she said. “We’re not giving 1 cent to the 1 percent. We’re moving further.”
But motivation is stronger than slogans, and Democrats like Pelosi, Lee and Speier are hoping that the country’s — and especially women’s — growing unhappiness with Trump will provide that needed boost to the party’s fortunes.
“When we lost the election, my granddaughters cried,” said Mimi Silbert, who runs the Delancey Street Foundation, headquartered across the street from Tuesday’s event. “Then the next day they went to the Women’s March, and they went from tears to hopeful eyes.”