In a completely unnecessary move, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to wade into the contentious Massachusetts Senate primary between progressive incumbent Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Joe Kennedy III, providing her endorsement to the latter. Her rationale: her father’s close ties to President John F. Kennedy and his grandnephew’s campaigning in 2018.
“I became close to the Kennedy family from then on,” Pelosi said of her father, former Baltimore Mayor and Rep. Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., who ran the president’s Maryland campaign in 1960. “I wasn’t too happy with some of the assault that I saw made on the Kennedy family, and I thought, Joe didn’t ask me to endorse him, but I felt an imperative to do so.”
The absolute, most generous read of Pelosi’s endorsement is that she’s simply fed up with Markey’s overtures to the Squad, namely his sponsorship of the Green New Deal, and figured that relying on opposing the senator’s negative campaigning was less politically risky than admitting she wants a moderate victory. But Pelosi’s comments speak for themselves, and in truth, class trumps partisanship. Like Kennedy, Pelosi would not have her position or her power without her well-known family, so class solidarity strikes again.
Consider that the D’Alesandros were the dons of the Baltimore machine for decades. Between her father and her brother, Pelosi’s nuclear family served a cumulative 16 years in office. Although Pelosi transplanted to San Francisco in adulthood for her husband’s wildly lucrative career as an investor, her brother’s friendship with former San Francisco Mayor Joe Alioto immediately granted Pelosi a seat at the table of power and a spot on the San Francisco Library Commission. After years of serving as a high-dollar fundraiser for Bay Area Democrats, such as former Gov. Jerry Brown, thanks to touting her familial connections, the dying California Rep. Sala Burton asked Pelosi to run for her seat.
Since then, Pelosi’s achievements have been on her own. But both she and Kennedy benefited from a world in which DNA dictates all. Hence, Pelosi would interpret Markey’s basic criticism of an underqualified congressman as an “assault” not on the young Kennedy himself, but his entire dynasty, which, regardless of rape allegations and homicidal tendencies, must be protected by the patrician class at any cost, lest the plebeians think they can join the ruling class.
