Editorials

From here it looks like a triumph of “Framing”—that’s the name given by my old friend George Lakoff to a political technique which is part of what we used to call “marketing” in the software industry. I’m referring to the iconic image of the new speaker of the House on the podium surrounded by small children. There were a few cynical cluck-clucks in the Planet newsroom, but in the living rooms of parents and grandparents across the country it brought tears to not a few eyes. An early version of same was Ronald Reagan shown against a background of American flags, but the framing of Nancy Pelosi was much better: dynamic and heartwarming, all at the same time.  

We don’t watch much television, but we happened to catch the McNeil-Lehrer news hour segment on Pelosi last week because one of our granddaughters was rumored to be part of it. And she was there, in all of her 4-year-old glory, in leotard with tutu, for all of 30 seconds, as one of the students at a dance school headed by the woman who ran against Pelosi as a Green candidate back in November. In order to catch this precious moment, we viewed the whole piece, which included lots of footage chosen to show Pelosi’s roots in Baltimore, where her father and brother had both been mayors.  

It couldn’t have been a more ideal picture of Pelosi if it were a paid political advertisement. The setting was Old Back East Urban: gritty brick row houses, corner grocery stores, kids playing in the street in front of stoops, old guys sitting around on benches reminiscing. It could have been The Hill in St. Louis, which I knew as a child, or South Philadelphia, or the Lower East Side of New York City—in other words, any of those places where Democrats once ruled, and where they delivered what local folks needed to get ahead as immigrants in a tough environment.  

A woman I know who lived in Baltimore for a while remembers that Nancy’s father, Tommy D’Alesandro, Jr., was thought of not only as the mayor, but as the “Boss” who ran the “Democratic Machine.” Those were terms used, mostly by members of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant former ruling class, to disparage political organizations run by upstart immigrants who learned how to work the system on behalf of countrymen. Rose Kennedy’s father and John Kennedy’s grandfather, “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was an Irish version in Boston. Often, though not always, Bosses and Machines had cryptic or open ties to organized crime, but D’Alesandro padre was known for standing up to the muscle boys.  

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who may be a member of the WASP ruling class or may just act like one hoping to fool us, had a snidely stupid column last week equating Nancy Pelosi with George W. Bush as just another rich kid. Berkeley blogger Brad de Long deftly refuted that one by running photos of childhood homes of both—with the Bush mansion on the shores of something-or-other looking way more impressive than Albemarle Street in Baltimore. It is true that husband Paul Pelosi has made a sizable fortune for the family with his investments, though nothing on the scale of a Bill Gates or a Larry Ellison, but Nancy was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth. 

(DeLong quoted a colleague’s take on the ever-more-unattractive Brooks in another context: “David Brooks? You’re using a tenured Harvard statistician to refute David Brooks?! You don’t use a tenured statistician, you use a fly-swatter!”) 

The interesting thing about Pelosi is that she is, relatively speaking, an old woman—that is to say she’s my age. That means she’s just about old enough to remember real Democrats, Roosevelt and Truman Democrats, who sincerely believed that it was the government’s job to take care of people who couldn’t take care of themselves. Unlike, for example, Hillary Clinton or Rahm Emmanuel or any of the other neo-Democrats who do their best to wiggle out of that responsibility. Pelosi hagiography says that as a child she worked in the office where her father’s constituents came to seek help, and it’s probably a true story.  

Emmanuel, in his role as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, did his best to make sure that the Democrats fielded centrist candidates who looked as much like Republicans as possible last November, but luckily he failed. Jerry McNerney is the best local example of the triumph of the Real Democrats, since he beat a DCCC entry in the primary before going on to win his House seat. Most of the newly elected Democrats supported ending the Iraq War right away, and Pelosi seems to be carrying the ball for them. East Bay people are cheered to see that she’s advised by our own George Miller, another legacy Democrat who can remember Real Democrats. If Nancy hangs in there, she just might be able to reclaim the Democratic heritage of being the people’s party.