The Washington Times reports today that if Democrats win the U.S. House, it isn’t a foregone conclusion that Rep. Nancy Pelosi will be the new Speaker. That’s because she doesn’t enjoy universal support in her party.
Heath Shuler, the former Washington Redskins quarterback who is challenging Rep. Charles H. Taylor in North Carolina, is another Democrat running in a conservative district who refuses to say whether he would support Mrs. Pelosi for speaker.
“He will support whoever he thinks will best represent this district,” Shuler spokesman Andrew Whalen said.
Mr. Taylor’s campaign — like vulnerable Republican campaigns in conservative districts across the country — has gone to some effort to smear the Democratic candidate by association to Mrs. Pelosi.
Shuler is leading Taylor in North Carolina’s 11th District. Incidentally, I found this amusing in the article:
Pelosi spokeswoman Jennifer Crider said it’s a campaign that won’t work.
“Republicans are without a single winning issue, so it’s no wonder they are desperately trying to falsely smear a churchgoing grandmother who has made fiscal responsibility, bipartisanship and middle-class tax cuts a priority,” she said.
“Churchgoing grandmother” is probably the last thing that comes to mind when I think of Nancy Pelosi.
Update 9:36 a.m.: Newsweek’s profile of Pelosi this week plays up the “grandma” image also:
A recent addition to her arsenal of barbs scolds Republican leaders for failing to stop former congressman Mark Foley’s lurid messages to teenage pages.
“As a mother and grandmother, I think ‘lioness’,” she says. “You come near the cubs, you’re dead.”
