There is a great fuss about the historically high number of House Democrats — 19 — who voted against the discredited Nancy Pelosi for speaker. More significant are the 173 who voted for her.
You have to go all the way back to the 1910s and 1920s to find so many defections at the beginning of a new Congress on a vote for the election of speaker as was seen on Wednesday. Some 11 Democrats voted for former NFL quarterback Rep. Heath Shuler, a North Carolina Democrat and prominent member of the moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Coalition. Another eight voted for various others, or didn't vote at all.
Why hasn't Pelosi relinquished the House Democratic leadership to someone on her right?
Because the Pelosi Democrats are practicing quintessential leftist tactics: You don't fold up your tent and relinquish power when you don't have to; you regroup and wait for the next opportunity to carry out more of your radical agenda.
Lenin said, "Russia achieved Marxism ... through the agony she experienced ... study, practical trial, disappointment ... ." Pelosi expanded the national debt from $8.7 trillion to $14 trillion, as CNS News' Terry Jeffrey noted on Thursday, and it has brought the agony of losing majority power.
But as the founder of the Soviet state reminded his fellow revolutionaries, "It is far more difficult — and far more precious — to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist." Today is the time to hang on tight, and wait for another chance to take even more trillions out of the taxpayers' pockets.
"Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing," Saul Alinsky reminded his fellow radicals.
Pelosi stepping down as Democratic leader would be a road not of the choosing of insightful radicals. It's important to read her tenure as speaker accurately. From the point of view of the American people, she failed. But from a leftist perspective — and that means from the viewpoint of today's Democratic Party's grass roots — she did things that were liberal pipe dreams just five years ago, such as taking over the health care sector of the private economy.
She and her 173 fellow revolutionaries all know that the pendulum will eventually swing back — if you just stick around long enough.
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