Pelosi monster surfaces in House campaigns
Beware! Nancy Pelosi is a colossal tax-dollar-engorged monster who ravages small towns and must be brought down by Republican ray guns. Or at least that is what a cartoon version of the House speaker looked like in “Attack of the 50-Foot Pelosi,” a television ad that a conservative group called Right Change aired in Pennsylvania last month.
A new Web site by the National Republican Congressional Committee portrays her as a malevolent puppet master, yanking the strings of 10 vulnerable House Democrats.
And a video on the campaign home page of GOP House candidate Harold Johnson of North Carolina makes her sound like someone out of those creepy cable ads for burglar alarms. “If you’re a small-business owner,” Johnson says, “you get up every morning and you put your helmet on, because you think that Nancy Pelosi is going to come into your bedroom and hit you over the head with a baseball bat.”
This is the kind of problem that J. Dennis Hastert, Carl Albert and Frederick Gillett never had to deal with. House speakers, with a few exceptions, have been such colorless legislative insiders that the mention of their names in most of America would have received no reaction beyond quizzical looks.
Not this year, and not this speaker. “If you go to almost any grass-roots event and you mention the speaker’s name,” said Bill Flores, a Republican who is challenging Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.), “you will get a huge response from the audience.” Which is why, by Flores’s estimate, he manages to drop Pelosi’s name into his speeches about as often as he does President Obama’s.
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It is working for Flores because Chet Edwards cannot avoid his votes for Pelosi, even though he is given a pass by Pelosi on some hot button issues.
