Scaling Wokeback Mountain: Dowd Defends Pelosi from AOC
In this extended excerpt from her New York Times Op-Ed, Maureen Down defends Nancy Pelosi from her own radicals. (See comments for the analysis.
WASHINGTON — I was feeling on edge. Writing a column that sparks an internecine fight among the highest-profile women in the Democratic Party is nerve wracking.
So I went to the gym. Alex Toussaint, the digital Peloton instructor inside the little screen on my spinning bike, had some wisdom for me — the kind of New Age bromide dispensed in spin classes everywhere:
You climb the mountain to see the world. You don’t climb the mountain so the world can see you.
I only wished A.O.C. was cycling alongside me to hear it as well.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ensorcelled me from the start. I loved the bartender-makes-good Cinderella story, the shake-up-the-capital idealistic dreams, the bravado about how the plutocrat president from Queens wouldn’t know how to deal with a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx.
And I imagined the most potent feminist partnership in American history: Nancy Pelosi as sensei, bringing her inside game, and A.O.C., the Karate Kid with a wicked Twitter game.
But instead, the 79-year-old speaker and the 29-year-old freshman are trapped in a generational and ideological tangle that poses a real threat to the Democrats’ ability to beat Donald Trump next year.
Pelosi told me, after the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of the border bill and trashed the moderates — the very people who provided the Democrats the majority — that the Squad was four people with four votes. She was talking about a legislative reality. If it was a knock, it was for abandoning the party.
That did not merit A.O.C.’s outrageous accusation that Pelosi was targeting “newly elected women of color.” She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.
A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.
The young lawmaker went further, implying that the speaker was putting the Squad in danger, asking why Pelosi would criticize them, “knowing the amount of death threats” and attention they get. Huh?
A.O.C. pulled back and said she wasn’t calling Pelosi a racist. But once you start that ball rolling, it’s hard to stop. (You know how topsy-turvy the fight is when the biggest defenders of Pelosi, who has endured being a caricature of extreme liberalism for decades, are Trump and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.)
The A.O.C. crew threw down the gauntlet in a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim. He wrote that when Pelosi and other Democratic mandarins try to keep the image of the party centrist, they are crouching in “the defensive posture” they’ve been in since the Reagan revolution.
Corbin Trent, a spokesman for A.O.C. and co-founder of Justice Democrats, the progressive group that helped propel her, told Grim: “The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party,” with the older generation “driven by fear” and “unable to lead.”
Message: Pelosi is past her prime.
Except she’s not.
And then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.
But Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you want.
The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.
Chakrabarti sent shock waves through the Democratic caucus when he posted a tweet about the border bill comparing moderate and Blue Dog Democrats — some of whom are black — to Southern segregationists in the ’40s.
Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.
“What votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.
“We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”
In the age ge of Trump, there is no more stupid proposition than that Nancy Pelosi is the problem. If A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide that burning down the House is more important than deposing Trump, they will be left with a racist backward president and the emotional satisfaction of their own purity.
Ron Powell
07/15/2019 @ 12:51 pm
This piece is posted for the benefit of those who can’t or won’t scale the New York Times paywall….
Alan M. Milner
07/15/2019 @ 6:01 pm
This is great. I love it. I would also love to get other people to do the exact same thing with the Washington Post and other paywalled publications. I especially hate it when someone posts a link to an interesting article on WaPO and then leaving me high and because I can’t get in to read it. I do sub to the Times, against my better financial judgment because I think that in truth the Times and lost it and the Post is really more where it is at.
Jonna Connelly
07/15/2019 @ 9:59 pm
I think with the Times you can still right click and enter through a private or incognito window. The Post has shut that down.
koshersalaami
07/15/2019 @ 4:04 pm
Thank you.
Ron Powell
07/15/2019 @ 4:35 pm
Kosh, Glad to be of service and assistance….
07/15/2019 @ 4:25 pm
Yeah… no.
Dowd is the worst type of limousine liberal there is. She is straight out of the “supp’ed with Maddy Albright” school.
In fact, I can see why she has defended Pelosi, seeing as how they BOTH have been dead wrong about Trump (Dowd’s “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.” column was instrumental in getting Trump elected), and are scared of anyone like AOC, “The Squad” or Sanders who will not swill champagne with them while looking down on the “others”.
Ron Powell
07/15/2019 @ 4:34 pm
“If A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide that burning down the House is more important than deposing Trump, they will be left with a racist backward president and the emotional satisfaction of their own purity.”
Amy, your opinion of Dowd is one thing, what is your reaction/response to this statement? It seems to be the essence of what she has expressed here….
koshersalaami
07/16/2019 @ 8:39 am
I was going to write a comment discussing this but instead I’m going to write a post. You’ll recognize it when you see it.
koshersalaami
07/16/2019 @ 8:53 am
This is weird. I can’t find a link to take me where I can post.
07/16/2019 @ 9:32 am
Ron, my reaction/response to that is “BULLSHIT”.
Number one, it is the standard demeaning, dismissive crap (aimed at 4 women of color no less, that is stereotypical of centrist Democrats.
Number two, it is full of falsehoods and disingenuous crap that is designed to mislead people into believing that unless everyone agrees and kowtows to the centrists then it is somehow always their fault (of course, the centrists are NEVER the ones who give an inch and help create party “unity”).
BTW, I personally am all for “burning down the House AND Senate. Telling Pelosi and Schumer they need to stop supporting Republican ideals or they are out on their asses is what Democracy is all about. Doing what Dowd recommends is reliving the story line of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.
Ron Powell
07/16/2019 @ 11:02 am
Amy, If Trump gets a second term he will leave the average citizen without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of… And, anyone anywhere who might be classified or characterized as “the other” will be at risk re their personal wellbeing, safety, and security….It will be open season on people of color, people of the LGBT community, Jews, Muslims, journalists, and women…
koshersalaami
07/16/2019 @ 9:53 am
The comment will be somewhat different than the post, so I’ll write the comment anyway.
One definition of insanity is to do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different result. I partook of this insanity for years until I finally understood what I was looking at.
This is the essence of our disagreement with Amy. This is the divide we can’t cross. We have a fundamental difference in our perception of morality. This is why I wrote a post saying that the Greens in no way belong to the Democrats and we should stop pretending that they do.
Here’s the difference:
On one side is the belief that the most important moral principle is who we help.
On the other side is the belief that the most important moral principle is what we stand for.
It doesn’t matter how nonsensical you think the other side is. It doesn’t matter that the thinking of the other side doesn’t compute. This is how the other side thinks and I don’t think you’re capable of changing it. I know I”m not, and it took a lot for me to admit that to myself.
I was dead certain when I read this post that Amy’s first reaction was going to be to attack Dowd. This makes sense. To her Dowd is a Sellout. To her most of us have disturbing Sellout tendencies. And the very idea that you’d quote Rahm Emmanuel means to her that you’ve clearly lost your mind.
My apologies to Amy for mansplaining. I”m male and I explain, though my explaining is in no way restricted to women. I especially apologize for representing her position, which she hates, but Ron, if you asked that question of Amy an explanation was clearly in order and I speak some aspects of Ronese more fluently than Amy does. My further apologies for the length of this comment.
As to why we’d ever consider Emmanuel a source for anything, that goes to why Dowd was dreaming about a conversation between Pelosi and AOC of a different nature. AOC is far clearer about what ultimately needs to be done, Pelosi has a clearer idea of how to get closest to that agenda. That’s her area of expertise: the How. And, like it or not, the How has value.
But, due to the difference in our takes on morality, more value to Ron and me than to Amy.
koshersalaami
07/17/2019 @ 9:20 am
I posted a different answer to this. I can’t post at the moment, though I can comment, so Jon was kind enough to post a pair of posts for me on his blog this morning. The topical post is called The Conversation AOC and Pelosi Aren’t Having.
07/18/2019 @ 9:15 am
Thank you for this post, R.P. While I agree with you, do not be encouraged. I also disagree with you, do not be offended. I’m sure we’ve all had positions where we straddled a median before, this particular issue I find it hard to find a middle. If “5” represents the middle between “1” and “9”, I find myself firmly planted at “2” and 8″. I agree with the merits of each position, and the criticisms.
Speaker Pelosi has been underestimated at every turn since she first ran against Harold Ford. In retrospect, the contest turned out to be a ridiculous pairing, however, it seemed like it would be close. By the time she reacquired the gavel, or as Trump calls it, the “gravel”, one could see that Tim Ryan would go down just like Harold Ford, and he did.
I can’t really articulate a good case for A.O.C., but I feel like she is Willie McCoy (Slim), in the “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” tune from Jim Croce. (Pelosi, of course, is Jim.)
“Uptown’s got its hustlers
the bowry’s got its bums
forty-second street’s got big jim walker
he’s a pool-shootin’ son of a gun
well he’s big and dumb as a man can come
but he’s stronger than a country hoss
and when the bad folks all get together at night
you know they all call big jim “boss””
Then there is A.O.C.
“well out of south Alabama come a country boy
he said i’m lookin’ for a man named jim
i am a pool-shootin’ boy, my name is willie mccoy
but back home they call me slim
he said i’m lookin’ for the king of forty-second street
he’s drivin’ a drop-top cadillac
and last week he took all my money, and it may sound funny
but i come to get my money back
(and everybody say, jack — don’t you know that…)”
I don’t know how or when this drama will reach its denouement, but I think time is on A.O.C.’s side.