Nancy Pelosi proves she has brass ones

(I've been thinking about starting to write a blog for a while and after seeing democracy in action, I finally got inspired. I hope to continue to get inspired a couple times a week)

George Bush could take a page out of Nancy Pelosi's book and learn what a real town hall meeting looks like. It ain't pretty but it is real democracy.

I attended Nancy Pelosi's Town Hall Meeting on Saturday morning and I have to admit, I had a ho-hum opinion of Nancy going in there, but I had a huge bowl of respect for her by the time it was all over. I go back and forth between knowing that she has to maintain some moderate ideals so she can lead the Democrats in the House and wishing that we were represented by a fire-brand liberal that doesn't pull any punches (see Bernie Sanders, Matt Gonzalez, or Mark Leno). I got to watch the event while sitting next to the next Congressman from California's 4th district, Charles Brown and his wife and campaign manager. Charlie was in the US Air Force for over 25+ years, has his teaching credential, and was even on the board of his credit union. He is the kind of leader we need in Washington, a leader with integrity who isn't bogged down in Washington-style politics. He is going to make John Doolittle wish he never got his wife that job working for Jack Abramoff

The middle school auditorium had about 1000 people in it and there was apparently an overflow room with more people. It began at 10am with just a moderator (some guy from the local AirAmerica affiliate) and Nancy on stage. The theme of the event was Iraq and national security, she began with about 25 minutes of comments discussing mostly those two topics and also touching on civil liberties and the illegal NSA phone-tapping. Toward the end of her comments there appeared about 20 people lining the side aisle of the auditorium holding signs that said "Bring the troops home NOW!" and "Nancy, stop funding the war!" They were silent and respectful but certainly took some attention away from what was going on at the front of the room.

Then another group popped up, this time it was women dressed in pink holding signs and wearing shirts issuing similar sentiments, they were standing in the middle aisle. During this time, Congresswoman Pelosi started taking questions and she wasn't offered a softball that I can remember. Since the format was that questions would be written down then given to staff walking through the audience, I was worried that they would be sanitized Bush-style ("I just want to tell you that I thank God every day that you are our Congresswoman") but they most certainly were not. Most questions were asked after the name at the top of the card had been read and the first question came from a local activist, Medea Benjamin. She wanted to know why Congresswoman Pelosi was supporting the war by not voting 'no' on the war appropriation bills that came before the House, and additionally why she would not lead the Democratic caucus in that same direction. Pelosi said she wasn't ready to not fund the troops and that the caucus didn't have a position on it. Now, I can assume that she meant that it was not politically viable to vote 'no' on war appropriations and that she couldn't get the Democrats to agree on this thing if they were starving in the desert and she happened to be driving the ice cream truck through their neighborhood; but that is my take on what she meant. And, I think she is right in that answer. It would be giving George Bush a chocolate covered sundae to vote 'no' on a war appropriations bill that is going to pass in a GOP house anyway and it is pretty obvious to me why she can't get the Dems to agree on this issue - we have as many views as there are Dems in the House.

It wasn't long after she started taking questions that some of the people holding signs started chanting and yelling, they were picking their spots, when there was a silence or a chance to be heard, it was effective. Other people started yelling stuff too and it was the first of many times that it got kind of out of hand. Eventually, Pelosi's aides brought the two groups of sign-holders down to the front of the auditorium. I couldn't understand this at first, but in hindsight it was a great thing to do, she acknowledged that they were there and that she understood where they were coming from. (Try to imagine George Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tom Delay acknowledging people they disagreed with at a public forum? Bush would have had them hauled away by the secret service)

After the main group of protesters were at the front of the room, she was able to answer more questions but every couple minutes or so people would start yelling random things at her, telling her to support impeachment or stop supporting the war. I think I heard a "free Mumia" in there too. She was sometimes a little distracted by the crowd, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, it is hard to talk to a room of 1000 people when 100 of them are yelling different things at you. I think she handled herself very well. Sometimes she would answer one of the shouts directly, if they caught her at a moment when she could hear it clearly, other times she raised her mic-aided voice over them, but she was never disrespectful and unfortunately, there were many people in the audience that were disrespectful.

She answered a question on impeachment, and she simply said that she wanted to handle it 'electorally' and that if people were fired up about impeachment they should work to win back the House this November so she would have the votes to impeach. I agree with her 100% on this but for different reasons. I think you need a certain amount of general public support to do some drastic things in government, like start a war or impeach the president. I think 70% of the US public should be in favor of these things before the government should take it up, it's just too important to not have some kind of super majority. Just because the Republicans didn't pay attention to these rules when they impeached Clinton or when they started the Iraq war, doesn't mean the rules don't exist. A 40% approval rating does not give the Democrats license to impeach, even if they did have a majority in either chamber, which, if you've been paying attention you might know, they don't.

It went on with her answering questions and getting interrupted every couple minutes or so. There was a funny moment when the moderator was handed a card from a staffer and he said it was from the overflow room and he was going to ask the question sight-unseen. The questioner wanted to know why Pelosi voted against putting a fence up along the entire US-Mexico boarder, even going so far as to quote Robert Frost in saying "good fences make good neighbors." This could have been the moment when the room was closest to consensus. Obviously a wall along the boarder is a horrible idea and I thought it funny that someone with those views had even shown up! It seemed like the far left had taken over but I guess there was at least on conservative, even if he was in the overflow room.

The craziest person of the day has to be a Katrina advocate. Pelosi took a question on hurricane rebuilding and talked in broad terms about how the most important thing is that the people of the community need to make the decisions, not the people in Washington or even Baton Rouge, she was right. Then a woman in the front row just about blew an o-ring trying to get Pelosi's attention, yelling "stop the bulldozers! stop the bulldozers!" She was a little bit out there. She was going on and on and staffers and Pelosi herself was trying to calm her down and get her to quiet down to no avail. She was just yelling and screaming about stopping the bulldozers, at one point she turned around to the audience and I could hear her say something like "we need to stand up to this NOW, we need to stop the bulldozers" As if the entire room was going to walk out of there and follow her Forrest Gump-style to New Orleans and lay down in front of the bulldozers. She was eventually booed by the entire crowd until she shut up - another moment of consensus on this very disagreeable day.

Nancy held her own and more throughout the day, offering more courtesy back than she was given and never calling for the secret service that was on both sides of the stage or the SFPD that was loafing around the entrances. And at the end of the day, I learned two things: just how far out there some people in San Francisco really are and how tough a lady Nancy Pelosi is. Just because we know Bush is a criminal doesn't mean the rest of the country does and doing things like moving to impeach or voting 'no' on war appropriations funding doesn't get us any closer to winning back a majority with which we can initiate change, it just moves us further out into the margins. Maybe it is because I'm from Michigan, but I realize that we certainly don't represent the thoughts of the entire country here in San Francisco, and we need to appreciate that when we ask our leaders to stand up in front of the entire nation. I'm glad these people were heard by Pelosi but at the end of the day I agree with what she has done and is doing - and she proved to me that I have a strong leader as my representative in congress.