The rest of the country is finally noticing what we local political observers have long known: Nancy Pelosi isn’t a fan of Scott Wiener, who is currently ahead in the race to succeed her in Congress. For months, people have been wondering when she’d really lean into her effort to muscle Connie Chan ahead of Wiener in the polls, and the answer is that she’s doing just that.
It’s just one of many political battles taking place these days across the country.
Politico offers several reasons for Pelosi’s enmity, ranging from Wiener’s fights with labor to the timing of his campaign announcement to stepping on Christine Pelosi’s toes. Local experts and observers I’ve talked with suggest people underestimate the role Nancy Pelosi’s Catholicism plays in her long-standing arms-length relationship with Wiener and some of his social legislation. Will Pelosi succeed in getting Chan elected? The polls are close and narrowing, so it could be a tense time on both sides until November.
Pelosi is already making clear that she will be a public force to be reckoned with in the Bay Area for some time, despite her congressional retirement. She’s setting up shop at U.C. Berkeley, home to the new Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy. Whoever gets elected to her seat in November is going to have her looking over their shoulder for some time to come.
Other political warfare
Pelosi can be happy that she didn’t tie herself to Wisconsin state Assemblywoman Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist and the progressives’ darling in the race to succeed termed-out Democratic governor Tony Evers. Hong, currently ahead in the race for the primary that takes place today, Aug. 11, is opposed by Evers and other moderate Democrats in that very purple state (a state that manages to reelect Republican Senator Ron Johnson, a far-right sharer of conspiracy theories, and Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, a liberal Democrat and the first openly lesbian senator).
Following the progressive primary victory in Michigan by Abdul El-Sayed and the earlier election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Wisconsin is the latest battleground for progressive and moderate Democrats.
Wisconsin voters will decide if “Vote for Me: I Hate You and Your Holidays” is a winning campaign.
Progressives should keep in mind that a progressive Democratic Senate nominee in Wisconsin, then-Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, lost a 2022 race against the man who was universally believed to be the single most vulnerable Republican incumbent — Senator Ron Johnson. This happened after the GOP naturally dug through Barnes’s past and came up with ammunition in the form of his past support for the “defund the police” movement.
Now folks have dug through Hong’s past and come up with past statements saying maybe we should cancel Thanksgiving and other holidays because she said they were problematic for some people. Though she’s tried to walk that back (gushing in a USA Today interview about how there is “nothing more magical than a cranberry marsh” and that she would not cancel Thanksgiving, as if that were a thing she could have done anyway. But USA Today noted “Hong’s troubles under the national spotlight for culture war stances continued … including an unearthing of previous social media posts criticizing Valentine’s Day, favoring abolishing the police and being uncomfortable around White people.” Today Wisconsin voters will let us know if “Vote for Me: I Hate You and Your Holidays” is a winning campaign.
And war politics
Some wars are actual wars, such as our ongoing fight with Iran, which seems to have turned into a new hostage situation, this time with the United States and Trump’s presidency being held hostage. The Iranian regime, which weathered a ferocious eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s that resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead, has strengthened its hold on power and on the Hormuz Strait as a result of this much more polite war. The country’s leaders have resolutely failed to collapse in the face of the U.S. and Israeli assaults; but worse for us is that they seem to have accurately taken the measure of Trump, and they know his bluster.
Now comes word that last week, the Pentagon issued a directive to munitions makers to increase the production of weapons to refill our depleted stockpile. Trump doesn’t want anyone to know this, because it weakens his hand in the negotiations he’s already lost. But it doesn’t matter, because the Iranians already know he threatens Armageddon only to back off while claiming new negotiations to end the war. Trump claims to be a master negotiator, so who are we to suggest he is not fully honest?
But after dozens of claims that the war was all over except for dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, the U.S. demands steadily declined from regime change to denuclearization to reopening Hormuz for a status quo ante.
Just how many times can we lose the same war?
