A Woman’s Place Is in the Home—not the House!
Among the more catchy slogans to date in the 2006 campaign is Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that “Perhaps it will take a woman to clean the house.”
With those words, the bug-eyed Democratic minority leader from San Francisco let it be known that she has her permanently dilated eyes focused on becoming the next Speaker of the House.
Make no mistake, Pelosi was not offering to scrub and wax the floors on Capitol Hill or to do the windows, even though she seems more suited for that line of work than controlling the speaker’s gavel.
Pelosi unveiled her play on words back in early spring as part of her “Culture of Corruption ” campaign designed to lead Democrats back to the land of milk and honey, also known as majority status in the House.
When Pelosi first introduced her strategy, Republicans like Tom DeLay, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, and Jack Abramoff were making negative headlines nearly every day. Calling Republicans the party of corruption did not seem that far-fetched or overly partisan.
Back then, one could reasonably conclude that Democrats deserved a chance to clean up the People’s House, which had become sullied by all those corrupt and corruptible Republicans.
Toss in the fact that the rehabilitated House would be lead by an aggressive woman, and you have a perfect setup for Nancy Pelosi’s ascent to the “A” team in Washington power politics.
But then a funny thing—several funny things, actually—happened to derail the Pelosi grand strategy. The crimes and peccadilloes of Democrats began to make the news: Slugging Capitol police, driving under the influence of drugs and or alcohol, accepting $100,000 in bribes on video, and hiding 90% of the bribe stash in home freezers.
The final straw came when Democrat Francine Busby, running to replace the incarcerated Cunningham, encouraged illegal immigrants to vote, and did so in front of a camera.
There was a “Culture of Corruption” all right, but its members were not just the lily-white, country-club Republicans Pelosi wanted so desperately to expose.
Instead, politicians with the letter D next to their names were turning Pelosi’s “Culture of Corruption” into something quite different from what she had planned—and not at all to her liking.
All of which proves that, at least in Pelosi’s case, a woman’s place is in the home—but not the House!
John W. Lillpop is a recovering liberal.
