This is a post I started to write many months ago. Some of the information is undoubtedly outdated, and the post is incomplete, but I wanted to share it anyway.
The Democrats are crowing over their victories in the mid-terms, but the progressives are in grave danger of believing that there’s been a major shift in the electorate. Their victory was far more of a wave of anti-Trump sentiment than it was any kind of endorsement of the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wings of the party.
They won in large part because they were able to rally a combination of people who usually only vote during Presidential elections (if at all), and college-educated women who discovered that President Trump was actually as bad as he had been portrayed in the 2016 campaign and that he wasn’t going to suddenly develop scruples after he took the oath of office.
The current focus of attention is on the Speakership of the House of Representatives. Rep. Nancy Pelosi is facing a tough battle to regain that title amid a small uprising of newly-elected Democrats who have pledged to vote against her. I’m going to repeat something I said on Twitter recently: I lived in the Bay Area for nearly 25 years and have watched Ms. Pelosi carefully. She’s smart as a whip, an adroit politician, and the best fund-raiser the Democrats have had in several generations. But she’s got the charisma of an aardvark in public. She’s not a hard lefty by any stretch, no matter how much the Republicans try to portray her as such. So, it comes down to a combination of logic and pragmatism. Ultimately, beyond the fact that there’s simply no viable alternative candidate among the current crop of Congressional Democrats, she is simply the best choice for the task.