{"id":7743,"date":"2013-04-24T07:15:44","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T11:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=7743"},"modified":"2013-04-24T08:47:55","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T12:47:55","slug":"yes-democrats-face-a-leadership-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/04\/24\/yes-democrats-face-a-leadership-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, Democrats face a leadership crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Can Nancy Pelosi lead Democrats and sell their ideas to the American people? (Photo: Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

In the wake of the collapse of the gun control push earlier this month, a lot of words have been ginned over the shortcomings of Barack Obama’s leadership in Washington.<\/p>\n

Howard Kurtz wrote in the Daily Beast<\/em> that the President had “stalled out.”\u00a0 Maureen Dowd in the New York Times<\/em> excoriated Obama for failing to understand how power works in the nation’s capital, writing:<\/p>\n

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think there are sharp limitations to this argument.\u00a0 As I wrote last week, Obama faces unprecedented levels of partisanship and divisiveness at a time when the institutions we use to govern our nation are profoundly dysfunctional.<\/p>\n

The “system” Dowd talks about just isn’t the same system that Lyndon Johnson worked to push through the Civil Rights Act, or that Richard Nixon steered toward creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.<\/p>\n

And the kind of bipartisanship that produced those landmark achievements is a thing of the past.<\/p>\n

But with those caveats firmly in place, I think it’s fair to say that Democrats face a troubling leadership crisis, one that goes well beyond the Oval Office.<\/p>\n

Democrats have chosen to stick by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, despite the fact that she is polling at only 31% — well behind Republican leader John Boehner, and well behind the ideas and policies supported by her own party.<\/p>\n

Defenders of Pelosi will argue that much of the vitriol aimed at her is unfair, or that it hinges on the fact that she is a woman in a position of power that has long been a male bastion.<\/p>\n

Fair enough.<\/p>\n

But it’s hard to make a convincing case that the House leader from San Francisco has the sort of public persona or communications skill that might overcome those hurdles, allowing her to make a winning case for the Democrats.<\/p>\n

Democrats have also continued to sail under the leadership of majority leader Harry Reid in the US Senate.\u00a0 Reid’s shortcomings are even more obvious than Pelosi’s.<\/p>\n

He is a white, socially conservative, pro-life Mormon from rural Nevada, hemmed in and pressured constantly by his unpopularity in his own state. His oratorical skills are the culinary equivalent of dry oatmeal.<\/p>\n

In a party defined by urban multiculturalism, outreach to Hispanics, and to young people and women, Reid appears often to be dragging along behind the Democratic movement.<\/p>\n

All of which would have been fine in the pre-Newt Gingrich era, when congressional leaders mostly operated behind the scenes, working the levers of power in relative anonymity.<\/p>\n

But these days, that doesn’t cut it.\u00a0 Reid and Pelosi need to hold their own on the Sunday talk shows, and in public appearances.\u00a0 They need to help craft Democratic ideas into the kind of narrative that makes sense to average Americans.<\/p>\n

Even as Democrats have won big elections — and pushed through some big, important legislation — their leaders have failed to offer that kind of, well, leadership.<\/p>\n

Those shortcomings haunted the party during the gun control debate.\u00a0 They may well trip up the next big fight over immigration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of the collapse of the gun control push earlier this month, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7745,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7743\/revisions\/7745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}