Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., was halting, confused and often nonresponsive in this week’s debate with Sharron Angle. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid looked as if he could barely stay on a linear argument,” concluded Jon Ralston, dean of Nevada’s political analysts, “abruptly switching gears and failing to effectively parry or thrust.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is best described as imperiously incoherent, a verbal train wreck of cliches and grim smiles. Like her fellow San Francisco lefty Sen. Barbara Boxer, Pelosi avoids extended conversations with the press, refuses any meaningful debate about ideas, and manages to infuse almost every public appearance with contempt for everyone who does not agree with her very narrow world view.
Reid and Pelosi — or, truth be told, their staffs and handlers — are on every ballot this fall. Obamacare, the stimulus, the wild, out-of-control spending and the 9.6 percent unemployment are their handiwork. Even the Dodd-Frank housing bubble is part of their legacy, given their leadership of the caucuses that empowered Chris and Barney.
Pelosi and Reid are endorsed by every vote cast for every Democrat at every level, and not just those contests involving the House of Representatives or the Senate, but also every governors’ race and every election for every state legislative seat.
Pelosi and Reid are two of the big three Democratic leaders who have run the country without interference for the past two years. Indeed, Reid and Pelosi have been at the helm of their chambers since January 2007, and waging political war against President Bush for even a longer period of years.
To them belong every line of every budget for the past four years, every giveaway to AIG, every sacked car dealer, every out-of-control agency power grab unchecked by the Congress.
Along with Presidents Bush and Obama, Pelosi and Reid define the decade of American life we are concluding, and they, more than even either president, are responsible for its tone of deep divisiveness and constant fury.
More than any other two people, they have refused to credit the good intentions of their opponents or to negotiate anything resembling compromise. They are the worst sort of ideologues: completely confident in the correctness of their beliefs however far-fetched, and however ruinously wrong in practice they turn out to be.
What is most shocking about the pair is the utter vapidity of their arguments. They don’t have any.
They are utterly without the ability to propose and defend propositions and lay out the logic of their views. If they read at all, much less widely, they have completely disguised the fact.
Their stumbling, bumbling public appearances make us long for the days of W. And always the arrogance — the baseless but ever present arrogance, the product of immersion in a closed system fueled by yes-men and lobbyists and upheld by a media that has always operated to protect the designated representatives of Manhattan-Beltway precedence.
The noncoverage of Reid’s disastrous debate contrasted sharply with the wall-to-wall focus on Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell. The media have been busy defending Nancy and Harry by keeping up a round-the-clock attack on Christine, Sharron, Michele and, of course, Sarah, even though these women have no power except the ability to persuade and Nancy and Harry have long, detailed records of failure.
Any fair historian of the future will be hard-pressed to puzzle through how the most powerful country on the planet arranged during a very perilous time to yield its leadership to two so obviously ill-tempered and ill-prepared extremists from two very small and deeply unrepresentative constituencies as San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Even more puzzling would be any vote for any of their supporters after the folly of their record was fully exposed.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
