Nancy Pelosi’s No Good, Very Bad Poll

Dr. Munr Kazmir
6 min readJun 30, 2021

A series of unfortunate events has befallen the Good Queen of San Francisco.

A person sleeps on a street in San Francisco in 2019. (photo: MudflapDC)

Who doesn’t love Nancy Pelosi?

She comes from a good, solid family of powerful politicians. She went to Congress decades ago to fight the AIDS epidemic then raging in her San Francisco community. She rose to become the first, second and only female Speaker of the House.

By tooth and nail, by hook and by crook, Pelosi managed to lead the charge to take down Donald Trump. It took everything Democrats had, plus COVID-19 and the BLM juggernaut, but Pelosi’s team managed it in the end.

Paradoxically, even quite a few Republicans love Nancy Pelosi.

She keeps some of the more unruly in her party in check, most times anyway. Republicans once used Nancy Pelosi, and her reputation as an unapologetic, free-spending, licentious San Francisco liberal to scare Republican donors into opening up their wallets.

“Better pay up,” they’d say, as if tucking their kids in at night with a nice bedtime morality tale; “or Nancy Pelosi will come and do to your district what she’s done to San Francisco.”

Except now, Republicans have way better targets to scare up donations than Nancy Pelosi. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez snatched that crown from Pelosi’s head three years ago.

Which is all to the good for Pelosi.

When you are Republican public enemy #1, you are a pain their legislative agenda, yes; but you are also very valuable to them. Consequently, Republicans turning AOC into cold hard campaign cash have warmer feelings towards her than swing-district Democrats fielding angry constituent calls about her while Republican challengers nip at their heels and progressives plot primary challenges.

Once you’re not enemy number one, however, you can just be a pain in the legislative agenda; no down side to that for a veteran opposition politician like Pelosi. She has probably spent more time out of power than in, during the course of her long and storied Congressional career. And she got where she is out of sheer determination and hard work.

What more could an expertly-coiffed, politically all-powerful street brawler with a $22,000 freezer full…