Pizza Diavola

Dear Speaker Pelosi

2008 November 5 at 11:21 AM (2008, activism, Cindy Sheehan, feminism, me, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, SF)

What are you declaring off the table now? Progressivism? Liberalism? Reform? (SFChron)

“the new president must take the country down the middle”

In other words, women, GLBTQI, non-millionaires, vets, members of the military, and the environment: don’t bother trying to crawl out from underneath the bus. Pelosi intends to keep steering it right over our bodies.

A Democratic candidate just won the popular and electoral votes and the Democrats picked up seats in the House and the Senate, and you use your bully pulpit as a leading Democratic politician and Speaker of the House to essentially concede the strength and PR capital of those victories? Shame on you. Shame.

Sincerely,
PD

The results of CA Congressional District 8:

Looking at those results, it appears that Cindy Sheehan got crushed in a landslide. Well, she did. However, Sheehan ran a grassroots campaign without the backing, guidance, and infrastructure of an established political party. She was a stranger to the political landscape of San Francisco, with its many political clubs, groups, and unions. She was almost completely ignored by the mainstream press, except when they wanted to paint her as unhinged, paranoid, and dare I say it, hysterical candidate on a vanity run, completely overlooking and hiding her policy goals and criticisms of mainstream Dems, Pelosi, and the media. And yet, despite all those obstacles, Sheehan received nearly twice as many votes as the Republican candidate and far more than the Republican and Libertarian candidates combined.

Cindy Sheehan received a mere 17.0% of the vote, but here’s the kicker: until yesterday, Nancy Pelosi had never received less than 76% of the vote in any general election race for Congress. Cindy Sheehan received 29,951 votes, which is more than any of the non-Dem/Repub candidates have ever garnered against Pelosi. It’s more than seven out of Pelosi’s 11 Republican challengers have ever received, including Dana Walsh. Jennifer DePalma received 31,074 votes, which was 12%, back in 2004, and in 1994, Elsa Cheung received 18%, with 30,528 votes.

It’s hard to say what will happen next and what this election means. Most likely, it means nothing as far as making Pelosi realize that a large number of her constituents are liberal and pissed as hell with her performance. As far as Sheehan is concerned, according to an email the CindyForCongress campaign sent out a few weeks ago, she’s renewed the lease on her office and is planning on continuing her antiwar advocacy work and running again in 2010. As far as I’m concerned, Sheehan’s candidacy is terribly inspirational. It’s a reminder that although this country was not founded on the ideal of participatory, equal democracy, where any citizen theoretically has the right to mount a campaign and take an active part in the governing of her society, it has evolved so far as to think that it was founded on that ideal. Sheehan reminds me of Senator Murray and former Governor Madeline Kunin, women who were just ordinary women–”just a mom in tennis shoes,” and a professor and mom that entered her first political race by accident–until they believed that they could do a better job of running their states than the people in power at the time, and went on to be great public servants and politicians.

To me, Cindy Sheehan’s campaign represents faith in the people, in the democratic process, and in participatory democracy, and a burning desire to make the world a better place. Although she lost, she put her ideals into action through her campaign and that’s fully something I can understand and get behind.

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