Former speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is not going to run for re-election to her San Francisco congressional seat in 2026. As speaker, while she was a shrewd tactician and had the skills to keep a boisterous caucus together on some major issues such as Obamacare and protecting some safety net issues, she was typical of the party’s old guard of neoliberals, very solicitous to Wall Street interests, unwilling to take on the oligarchy, or to make even the mildest criticisms of any atrocity that Israel committed. This made her out of step with the current generation and it was definitely time for her to go.
The next Democratic politician who should leave is senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, for the same reasons as Pelosi.
Another person who should go is Pelosi’s successor as House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. He is almost invisible at a time when he should be front and center in the media, fighting against the fascistic movement that the Republican party has become. He and Schumer should be on the steps of the Capitol building every day giving press conferences highlighting the Republican atrocities and presenting a vigorous alternative vision for the country. They just do not seem to have the desire or the energy to do what needs to be done and the new generation of politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are showing them up.
It is not just about age. Bernie Sanders, who is older than Schumer and Jeffries, is out barnstorming the country with AOC in deep red areas of the country making the case for a new vision for the country and drawing huge crowds, while Schumer and Jeffries linger in the shadows. Tuesday’s election results has put fire into the campaigns of Democratic candidates all over the country and Schumer and Jeffries should be out there urging them on. But as we saw in the New York mayor’s race, they are both milquetoasts, with Jeffries issuing a lukewarm endorsement of Mamdani (who was after all his own party’s candidate) just a day or two before election day and Schumer not just not endorsing his own party’s candidate but refusing to say whom he even voted for (presumably because he voted for Cuomo) which is an act of cowardice for a politician.
It is time for the old guard in the Democratic party to go.
Schumer’s trying to play it safe: if Mamdani succeeds, he can jump on that badwagon later, and if he fails, he can claim he never endorsed or voted for him. Absolute cowardice.
I’m just waiting to see what kind of fabrications they come up with to try to revoke Mamdani’s citizenship and deport him, since all else has failed. They’re already “investigating” him, while they sit on their hands about Musk’s already documented immigration fraud.
Definitely. We need more people who live in the now, rather than an idealized liberal version of the 1970s.