CNN is evidently reporting that Nancy Pelosi is coming out of hiding for Bob Casey.

I hope she hits a Republican county. Better than any GOTV call for a Republican. Whenever I am in a room of conservatives who are not paying attention, all I have to say is “Speaker Pelosi” to make them shut up. ~Kathryn-Jean Lopez

The question on everyone’s minds has to be: how do you get the conservatives who are “paying attention” to shut up?  [Note: by “not paying attention,” Ms. Lopez would seem to mean, “complaining about egregious Republican misrule” since a lack of attention is not normally associated with excessive chatter.]

Personally, I think it’s almost cute that people think the appearance of Nancy Pelosi can drive people to get out and vote for Republicans, as if she possessed some kind of talismanic power to mobilise disenchanted conservatives. 

She is at once a silly woman (“the Speaker’s gavel has been in the hands of special interests, but now it will be in the hands of America’s children,” quoth Pelosi) and a fearsomely successful organiser and disciplinarian.  She may hold extreme views, but she is not someone who spouts off a lot of ideas–no one would accuse her time as minority leader has been one of Big Ideas or bold proposals!  In her management of the Democratic caucus, she makes the Keystone Kops running the GOP caucus post-DeLay look like a bunch of fools with respect to maintaining party unity and message.  She is the daughter of a machine politician and has inherited the knack for it.  If the Republicans think they can run to the wine-and-cheese Frisco angle every time they need help, they will be in bad shape in two years’ time. 

She is polarising to those who know something about her, but the people who know much about her are shockingly few.  Those who know a bit about her may know that she is from California; they will be aware that she is a Democrat; the really attentive will know that she represents San Francisco; the unduly obsessed will know that she has five children and grew up in Baltimore; the lunatic political junkie (I fall into this category) will actually know where she stands on some of the issues (she has been blissfully vague about most, so some is the best we can do); the hyperventilating partisan is convinced that she will usher in the annihilation of mankind. 

She wants to raise the national minimum wage, I hear tell, and while I oppose that move I can see how a lot of people in, say, Ohio would be only too thrilled to have her talk about that part of the Democratic agenda.  In an age of apparent relative wage stagnation, talk of mandating a rise in the minimum wage is psychologically very appealing, even if it is macroeconomically stupid.  Invite her to Ohio and watch the Republicans lose an extra seat!  That would be good for a laugh.  All the while, the Republicans are thinking that Pelosi’s appearance will be a boon for them–why?  Even after all that the media did to pound the “extremism” of Gingrich “the bomb-thrower” into everybody’s minds in 1994, only a minority of the country even knew who he was.  I am not positive about this, but I bet Pelosi’s name recognition nationwide is no higher than 50% (I see from the Hotline poll that her name non-recognition is just under 50% threshold).  Her unfavourable rating is apparently no higher than 30 in all of the polling done in the last month.  The most recent poll, done by Diageo/Hotline, gives her a 24% unfavourable rating vs. 19% favourable.  42% had never heard of her. 

It is possible that she will alienate a lot more people should she become Speaker, and it seems likely that the GOP will do all it can to make sure people get a bad impression of her, but if she pursues a minimalist agenda and doesn’t approach things quite so ham-fistedly as Gingrich she may win over a lot of people who are just beginning to be acquainted with her.  Her unfavourables will go up into the high 30s, but I doubt they will reach Hillaryesque mid-40s.  She is a Frisco left-liberal, sure enough, but the real question will be whether she comes off as personally antagonistic and unlikeable (such is the pathetic standard by which such people are judged today) or whether she will play the, “I’m a Catholic grandmother and I am just like you” angle.  (It matters less that she isn’t like you, which she obviously isn’t, so long as she can convince you that she is–behold Bush and the evangelicals for confirmation.)  If she does that, Republican operatives will be reduced to quivering blobs of rage as they try to land blows on Pelosi and keep finding only air (just as they did with Clinton).  If she descends into the tar pits of making every attack on her an act of sexism designed to undermine the “first woman Speaker of the House,” watch her unfavourables go through the roof. 

But all of this makes me wonder: what would the Republicans have done this week without the blundering Kerry?  What on earth would they have had to talk about?  Can’t talk about Iraq–all sorts of uncomfortable questions would come up.  Fact is, they haven’t much to talk about at all.  The fixation on Kerry is tied to this obsession with Pelosi, Rangel, Conyers, et al.  They seem to think that they can make a House election turn on personalities, when this cannot possibly work when there are so many personalities to keep track of and so many races to follow.  They have nothing to offer, and so must keep harping on the absurdity of the other side’s politicians (and they have plenty of targets, I grant you), but the trouble is that almost nobody knows who they are! 

This campaign in general has reached a point where it is not much more than slinging duelling accusations of “Daddy’s boy!” (aimed at those who support Bush) with “yo’ Mama!” (aimed at those aligned with Pelosi).  But in all of this, conservative voters are baffled as to why they should reward the incumbents who have no positive record to show for their time in office.  Warning about the dark days of the Pelosi Era won’t do it.  When under threat from the Turks, you don’t ask whether Timur is a decent, upstanding fellow; you’re just glad that he takes Bayezid away in a cage.  The same is true today with the voters’ attitudes towards the GOP.