(New York) The day after her husband’s assault, whose whereabouts the perpetrator wanted to know, Nancy Pelosi co-starred with Joe Biden in a brand new Republican ad accusing Democrats of “destroying our country.”
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
“Borders: open. Streets: dangerous. Economy: in ruins. It’s time to save America. Kick the Democrats out of the House and vote Republican on November 8,” reads the text of this digital ad where Pelosi appears, features drawn, behind an angry-faced Biden.
If there’s one group that could have wanted to give the Speaker of the House of Representatives a break after the attack on Paul Pelosi, even for a day or two, it’s the one who paid for it. this ad broadcast on Facebook and Instagram.
It’s the House Republican Campaign Expenses Committee, whose head, Kevin McCarthy, dreams of succeeding Nancy Pelosi after the midterm elections.
PHOTO EVELYN HOCKSTEIN, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Republican lawmakers Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at an event in Washington on September 29.
But McCarthy and his top aides may no longer be able to see the colleague or woman behind the Democrat whom the Republican Party and its media allies have demonized for two decades. Demonization that is sometimes literal, with Pelosi being portrayed with horns or red eyes in some posters. Demonization which has led in recent years to the arrest of several men suspected of wanting to assassinate him.
In another era, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts Ted Kennedy held this role of nemesis par excellence among the Republicans. He embodied everything conservatives hated about liberals (or progressives), including an unwavering belief in the role of government in helping those less fortunate. He thus found himself in a number of Republican ads warning voters against the temptation to make the United States a “Taxachusetts”, a nickname they gave to Kennedy’s state.
Since 2003, the year she took the lead of the Democratic group in the House, Nancy Pelosi has replaced Kennedy in the pubs of the Republicans. The latter can all the more easily caricature her as she lives in San Francisco, bastion of the American left, and that she enjoys a great fortune thanks to her marriage to the boss of a consulting and investment company. in real estate and venture capital.
This caricature, which is full of sexism, ignores the full story of Nancy Pelosi, only daughter of former Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, who raised five children before climbing one by one the political ranks to become, in 2007, the first woman to be chosen “Speaker of the House”.
Returning to this influential position since 2019 after an eight-year purgatory, Pelosi may therefore have to hand over her House Speaker hammer to McCarthy next January. The latter also pushed a joke last year on this subject which seems even more grotesque since the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi.
“I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that hammer. It will be hard not to hit it with it,” he said after being presented with a giant hammer at a fundraising event in Tennessee.
Not all Republicans joke about going after Nancy Pelosi. In 2018, Marjorie Taylor Greene liked a post on her Facebook page that “a bullet to the head would be [une façon] faster” to remove Pelosi from office. In 2019, the future Republican Representative from Georgia also promoted a petition calling for Pelosi’s impeachment for “treason.”
“It’s a crime punishable by death,” she said in a video found by CNN.
After her election, Greene put these statements on the account of a bewilderment in the QAnon conspiratorial movement from which she swears to have recovered.
Paul Depape, the suspect in the Paul Pelosi assault, isn’t done with QAnon yet, judging by his social media posts. Some of his positions join, in part or in whole, those of Republican tenors on the censorship of the Big Tech, the 2020 presidential election, the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, and transgender people. The 42-year-old also appears to hold deeply racist and anti-Semitic views.
However, he does not mention Nancy Pelosi in his posts. But the question he repeated during the Paul Pelosi assault, according to multiple outlets — “Where’s Nancy?” — recalls that of certain rioters during the assault on the Capitol — “Where are you, Nancy? “.
Republicans, including Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, have expressed horror and disgust at Paul Pelosi’s assault. Others have remained silent, including Donald Trump, who once called Nancy Pelosi a “mean, vindictive, horrible person.”
In the first 24 hours after the attack, none granted the wish of California Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, who had called on Republican leaders to speak out against the violence.
This violence doesn’t just threaten Democrats, as the arrest of a gunman near the home of conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh demonstrated last June.
But, last Friday, she appears to have targeted a woman demonized for 20 years by Republicans.
Never in the headlines Time
In Madam Speakerher biography of Nancy Pelosi published last year, Susan Page describes the thousand and one ways the Speaker of the House of Representatives has been underestimated during her political career, often because of her gender.
But Pelosi never cried sexism, with one exception. She has not yet digested the fact that the magazine Time did not see fit to dedicate its cover to her to highlight the page of history she wrote in 2007 by becoming the first woman to hold the position of “Speaker of the House”, or any other of her legislative exploits in the during his first four years in this position.
Two weeks after the Democratic thaw in November 2010, his anger escalated when he saw, on the front page of the Timethe photo of his Republican successor, John Boehner, accompanied by the title: “Mister Speaker”.