Pelosi says ‘elections should not matter as much as they do’

The outrage in the newsrooms of The Washington Post and the New York Times would be absolutely off the scale, with editorials, columns and blog posts about the dark anti-democratic underside of the totalitarian Right flying in every direction.

And the Hitler references would scream from the headlines, lead sentences, all three main points and conclusions of the columns condemning Boehner by uberlefties like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne, both of whom would be so overwrought with emotion that they would have to take extended vacations to recover.

The reality, however, is that it wasn’t Boehner who uttered those words, it was his predecessor as speaker, Nancy Pelosi, speaking in Boston at Tufts University. That perhaps explains why I found nothing on the websites of either the Post or the Times when I searched for that phrase, “elections should not matter as much as they do.”

Even so, when I first read her statement, I was dumbfounded, and assumed it could not possibly be a true report of her words.

But then I watched the video on Real Clear Politics and there she was, arguing that whether you support President Obama or not, Republicans and Democrats should have such strongly “shared values” that “it doesn’t matter so much who wins elections,” then lamenting that “elections should not matter as much as they do.”

In other words, if all of us share the same — liberal — values that Pelosi and Obama espouse, then it won’t matter which candidate or party wins the elections because the same policies will result.

Pelosi’s logic is impeccable: If everybody says A, then everybody does B. But if we all agree, why even have elections?

Blunt as they are, the former House speaker’s words are not merely a reformulation of the classical liberal truism that the American political tradition is intrinsically liberal, so conservatives are an alien species in the new world.

She is rather expressing the impatience of the Left, the ideologue’s demand that reality be remade right now and regardless of the facts, according to the vision of what it ought to be rather than what it is.

The same impulse is behind Obama’s approval of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson’s plan to implement a regulatory version of the cap-and-trade program Congress rejected.

So what if a Democratic Congress read the polls showing majorities of Americans oppose cap and trade, and therefore decided against passing a program proposed by a president of the same party?

If cap and trade can be decreed via regulatory promulgation by unelected bureaucrats, Obama and Jackson have no qualms about doing so because they are convinced they know better than either Congress or the public.

Speaking of elitists possessing uperior knowledge, the same ideological fanaticism is seen in Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent assertion that he knows the law better than members of Congress do concerning the proper adjudication of terrorist cases from Gitmo.

Let’s not forget, either, all those “czars” Obama appointed, four of which were just defunded by the House Republican majority. One might think that a community organizer cum liberal president would be the last chief executive to appoint such officials, since czars are accountable to no one, and especially not to voters.

Such thinking has it exactly backwards, however, because people who in their heart of hearts believe elections shouldn’t matter so much – unless, of course, the right candidates win – will be first in line to appoint czars.

But don’t worry, because liberal czars have the right “shared values.”

Examiner columnist Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and a regular contributor to Beltway Confidential.