Golub versus the Rubber Chicken

Shirley Golub has managed to go viral with her "rubber chicken" ad aimed at La Diva, Nancy Pelosi, the present Speaker of the House and U.S. Representative from San Francisco. It's a YouTube hit. I saw the actual ad on network TV and it caught my eye. So there really was a genuine challenger from within the Democratic Party for Nancy's seat in the House.

Shirley's originally from New Jersey, with degrees from Boston University in speech therapy and education. She worked in Hayward, California in that field, then bought an auto tune-up franchise at Pacific & Polk in San Francisco. She operated that shop for 20 years, then transitioned into real estate (according to her website) because "her lease was up." I guess I follow. Maybe she got tired of running a tune-up shop and longed for the corridors of power in the Capitol Building. Obviously a woman of parts, as the Brits say, and sometimes auto parts.

The political ad features a yellow rubber chicken talking into a microphone next to a name plate with "Nancy Pelosi" written in block letters. It takes La Diva to task for supporting the Iraq war, torture and for refusing to initiate impeachment, which Nancy famously took "off the table" as soon as she succeeded to the Speakership. The ad says that Pelosi is "spineless" and a "coward."

I don't vote in Pelosi's district, but a challenge such as Golub's does focus my attention on the way things are run in Washington. The "insider's game," which Pelosi plays to the hilt, is based on strategies of incremental gain; consolidating Democratic power; and huge compromises. Her confederates Rahm Emmanuel and Steny Hoyer play the game the same way. I think Pelosi's strategy from the start was probably shrewder than we give her credit for. She had been in the District of Columbia a lot longer than Bush when W came to town in 2001. I think the Democratic leadership had L'il George marked for a rube who was in over his head from the beginning; once the Dems took over the House and gained a marginal advantage in the Senate, they settled on a ploy of giving Bush the rope he needed to hang himself. Pelosi said as much; Iraq was "Bush's war," and the funding would be there, but the execution of the war was up to him.

Along the way the Democrats placated their base with occasional tokens of resistance. Doling out the money in small increments at times, so that Bush had to make a public display of demanding funds more often, imposing "nonbinding" time lines so that Bush would veto the bill (confirming that Iraq was a war without end), placing veterans' benefits in the funding bills so that Bush's hypocrisy in "supporting the troops" without supporting the troops became patent.

Drip, drip, drip. Along the way, the Democratic-led Congress became, in opinion polls, at least as unpopular as Bush. But the Democrats also knew that the American populace did not identify itself with Republicans anymore, and more than anything else, the borderline destruction of the Republican Party has been accomplished by one man, George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States, a politician so radioactive that when he sent his VP to Mississippi to rescue a Republican candidate in deep trouble, it sealed the deal for the Democrats.

I have a hard time arguing with anything in Shirley Golub's platform. It's just what you'd expect in a progressive agenda: single payer health care, out of Iraq in 90 days, aggressive approach to global warming, abolishing the electoral college, no telecom immunity. The sort of issues that liberal-minded people of my generation throw around the dinner table and solve so easily in their heads.

And which never seem to happen in real life, not in this country. Meanwhile, I think at least in the House the Democrats will go on to their super majority. Talk has it they will own 250 seats out of 435, a 57% majority. I don't think they'll need to overcome Presidential vetoes after January, 2009, so the remaining bottleneck will happen because of that strange "60-vote" rule the Senate uses without any Constitutional authority. Something else Shirley would no doubt change if she had the chance.

I don't think Ms. Golub will defeat Nancy Pelosi, of course. San Franciscans aren't going to turn the big-eyed Diva out of the Speakership and replace her with a tune-up shop owner. Nancy has real power. She's made her bones in D.C. playing against the Big Boys. It may be true, of course, that her power is mainly used in order to consolidate more power for her party, and that the "issues" are mainly game pieces toward that purpose. The war's okay as long as it sinks Bush and his party, which it certainly has. Whether any of this is good for the country is, in the final analysis, quite beside the point.