TIM REDMOND, SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN - Pelosi is by no means a San Francisco liberal. She's a Washington insider, a born and bred politician who cares more about power and money than she does about any particular ideology. I'm glad the Democrats are in charge, and Pelosi deserves tremendous credit for making that happen. But she's not about to push any kind of ambitious left-wing political or cultural agenda.
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid anti-government conservatives can love. Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations. And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is "not an issue that we're fighting about here." I think it's pretty safe to say she's never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi. . . has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It's nice moderate stuff - raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it's brilliant: there won't be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She's whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.Along the way, though, she's pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn't even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington. . .
If the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us.
http://www.sfbg.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=2094
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