Legacy of Nancy Pelosi’s political home base called literally deadly
The San Francisco in which Rep. Nancy Pelosi “came of age politically also differed greatly from the one that instinctively re-elects her every two years,” a columnist noted. Pelosi “represents a geographically tiny district – the nation’s smallest outside of Manhattan – that ranks as one of the most politically homogenous in the nation,” Daniel J. Flynn wrote for The American Spectator Nov. 9. Pelosi “can represent her constituents or speak for her colleagues. She cannot do both. This poses problems for the sustainability of the Democratic House majority,” Flynn wrote.
In the 1970s, Flynn chronicled in his book “Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco”, how Bay Area figures entered politics at their own risk. “The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), with its not-so-catchy catchphrase ‘Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people,’ ” assassinated Oakland superintendent of schools Marcus Foster on Election Day in 1973,”Flynn noted. “Two months later, the Zebra Killers severely wounded future San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, then a member of the California Commission on Aging, by shooting him twice in the chest.”
Flynn continued: “In 1975, the New World Liberation Front (NWLF) placed a bomb on a windowsill outside of San Francisco supervisor Dianne Feinstein’s daughter’s bedroom. The group shot out windows of her vacation property later that year. Several of Feinstein’s colleagues on the Board of Supervisors received bombs disguised within candy boxes. In the midst of a police and fire strike in late summer, someone placed a bomb on Mayor Joseph Alioto’s front lawn along with the threatening message: ‘Don’t Threaten Us.’ That September, San Francisco witnessed serial joiner Sara Jane Moore attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford. And forty years ago this month, Supervisor Dan White, a centrist Democrat close to Feinstein, murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in an act of sour grapes in response to the mayor’s about-face refusal to re-seat him on the board from which he had recently resigned.” Pelosi was elected as a member of the Democratic National Committee in 1976 and as the party chair for Northern California the following year. She “owed her standing, and later her seat in Congress, to the Burton political machine,” Flynn wrote. “This machine, and the Northern California Democratic Party that Pelosi chaired, worked overtime to legitimize San Francisco’s most diabolical purveyor of political violence in a decade dominated by it.
Today, Pelosi hails from “a city that bans plastic straws, freebie Happy Meal toys, and the sale of fur coats … a parochial cosmopolitanism that does not translate well to other districts,” Flynn wrote. Now, “for Pelosi to hold on to the speaker’s gavel, she needs to let go of the crank causes and extremist politics that characterizes her adopted hometown. And if her entry into San Francisco politics did not provide this lesson then perhaps her last exit from the speaker’s chair might. After aggressively pursuing a far-left agenda after Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, House Democrats lost 63 seats 2010.” Abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), holding impeachment hearings, and pushing Medicare for All “each strike as precisely the type of ideas enjoying popularity in San Francisco that suggest doom for Democrats elsewhere should the incoming speaker pursue them,” Flynn wrote.
https://www.worldtribune.com/legacy-of-nancy-pelosis-political-home-base-called-literally-deadly/