New Speaker of the House (elect) Nancy Pelosi was dealt a very public black eye yesterday when Steny “K-Street” Hoyer defeated Jack “You can bribe me later” Murtha for Majority Leader.
Stuart Rothenberg at Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire on Pelosi’s first loss:
Having said that, Nancy Pelosi’s decision to pick a public fight with her second in command, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, is so incomprehensible, so politically stupid that it has raised eyebrows among political journalists and insiders of all type.
For weeks, I have been suggesting that Pelosi will be a lot smarter and more subtle that her conservative critics warned, and that she won’t drive the Democratic bus off the cliff. But now I’m not so sure. [...]
Nancy must know that if she wants to get anything done, she’s going to have to filter it through Hoyer, as he clearly has more support and backing via the Moderate and Conservative factions of the Dem caucus.
So, after putting her chips on Murtha, she’s 0-1 early in the season.
If Nancy doesn’t change her intention to give the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee to Rep. Alcee “Impeach Me” Hastings (D-Fla.) instead of to Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), Nancy will have be staring up a steep hill with an 0-2 record.
Even the LA Times is lambasting Nancy to “not snub Harman”:
Hastings, like Murtha, seems an unlikely choice for a leadership role in what Pelosi has been advertising as “the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history.” Hastings was impeached as a federal judge and removed from office in the late 1980s (although he was acquitted of bribery in a criminal trial in 1983).
A litany of explanations have been adduced to explain why Pelosi would bypass Harman, an expert on intelligence matters who has won the respect of both parties while criticizing some of the Bush administration’s excesses in the war on terror. None of them is persuasive. Harman has earned this chairmanship.
I expected Nancy to be a crude, strong handed, and exceptionally effective Speaker for her party. And she still very well could prove to be exactly that. But with her incomprehensible backing of Murtha, and her apparent preference for Hastings…she looks to be…well…exceptionally inept.
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Gaus at Blue Crab Boulevard thinks that the L.A. Times is trying to give Nancy a sublte warnign about how they might cover her decision should she go with Hastings instead of Harman:
They are strongly advising that Alcee Hastings would be an extraordinarily bad choice for that job. They are also telegraphing here. It will be hazardous to Pelosi’s future press coverage if she does this.[...]
[...] Alcee Hasting’s name is not a common household item of discussion. Yet. I read this as saying that the name and Pelosi’s decision if she proceeds will become a common item of discussion. This could well turn into another lose-lose for Pelosi in a hurry. Frankly, having Hastings, a man who was tried, convicted and removed from office by the Congress for official corruption, would be a real blow to Pelosi’s stated goal of running a clean shop. And the press will make sure the world knows it if she continues. [...]
Damn…this blogging-from-a-minority-perspective thing looks like it’s going to be a lot more fun than I had initially expected. Thanks, Nancy.
You mean: “not snub Harmanâ€:
Damn…this blogging-from-a-minority-perspective thing looks like it’s going to be a lot more fun than I had initially expected. Thanks, Nancy.
I’ve noticed you’ve seemed to take to it. I can imagine it hasn’t been fun trying to come up with defenses to the inanities of the 109th Congress and the Bush Administration.
(Speaking of… I hope you comment on Bush’s ‘lessons’ from the Vietnam War.)
Left by Preston on November 17th, 2006 at 9:37 am