You can use chairmanships to create the kind of leadership you want and to reward fellow congressmen, but if Pelosi uses her appointment power in a punitive matter and denies chairmanships to anyone simply because they did not support Murtha, she will use up a lot of good will with fellow Democrats and possibly earn a lot of enemies within the party. She would run the risk of factionalizing the party between liberals and Blue Dog Democrats. I realize she has used some heavy-handed tactics in the past to keep Democrats in line, but she will have more to lose than to gain if she uses this vote to determine who will and who will not chair committees. Pelosi has her job cut out for her. She needs to find some way to keep the Blue Dogs in line with the party when they vote. Antagonizing them this early over such an issue would not be smart, and no one has ever criticized her for being stupid.
Exactly. The forum republicans are just desperate for anything to be anti-democrat about. I love it. Boy you really are afraid of her aren't you? :lol: You should have read my post, then you would have seen the sentence "I wasn't defending Pelosi, Murtha or Hoya. Just talking about them and making some guesses." How can I defend her when she did nothing that requires defense? She supported the man that supported her. It's called political loyalty. Then she got herself elected by acclaimation. What I was challenging was BB's notion that she got "a bloody nose" and was rebuked by her party. Not a chance. It was Murtha who received the message that he had not paid enough dues to be a party leader and that Hoya had.
I don't know how hard she campaigned for her candidate, but the fact that Murtha was her candidate who was running against a political opponent of Pelosi's suggests she may have buttonholed a lot of Demos. But regardless of whether she did or didn't, the election of Hoya was a bloody nose for Pelosi. This is not desperation. It is a fact. All political commentators and journalist regardless of their political leaning agree that the vote was an embarrassment for the house speaker.
No they don't. I watched the Sunday news shows and many are saying exactly what I said, including Hoya himself. They made two main points. 1. Pelosi knew that Hoya had the votes but she backed Murtha because she owed him personally. Politically, she gets along with Hoya and she did not pull out all the stops to get him defeated. She got to put Murtha in his proper place in the party while retaining his future support. Meanwhile she got an overwhelming vote of approval on her own position, not a bloody nose. Pelosi is no fool. 2. This is a passing story in a slow week. The average citizen doesn't care squat about who the congressional leaders are and couldn't name them if their life depended on it. This story will be as dead as a John Kerry botched joke in less than a week.
Kinda like how you and a few others are desperate for anything to be anti-bush about. It goes both ways.
