Bernie Sanders and his supporters are still smarting from the way the Democratic Party treated them during the primaries in the 2016 presidential election. Many are under the impression that had the socialist from Vermont won he would have beaten Donald Trump. The supposition is dubious at best, but the hurt feelings are moving the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party to primary a number of office holders that they feel are too establishment and insufficiently left. Top on the list of elected officials to be done away with is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a San Francisco attorney named Stephan Jaffe, a hardcore Sanders supporter, intends to challenge Pelosi next year. Jaffe is in his early 70s, so he is hardly a great young hope, but what he lacks in youth he makes up for in zeal. He fought hard for Sanders last year and supporters a single payer, government-run health care system. Jaffe maintains that Pelosi takes too much money from corporations and special interests.
The idea that Nancy Pelosi is too much of a moderate might come as a surprise to many people. She has developed a reputation as a relentlessly partisan liberal ever since she entered the House leadership, more combative than cooperative. She rarely deviates from the party line in her public statements that the Republicans are evil and anything they propose must be opposed to the last ditch.
Still, the 77-year-old Pelosi is beginning to show her age. Recently she publically prayed that George W. Bush should be president rather than Donald Trump. She also claimed that a Democratic House would cooperate with President Trump just as it did with Bush, though someone with a memory of the last two years of the Bush administration when the Democrats did control the House would wonder what sort of cooperation is that.
The Democrats have an age problem, no question. Bernie Sanders is in his late 70s. Joe Biden, who is toying with the idea of running for president again in 2020, is 74. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who for many is the great leftist hope, is a spring chicken at 67 as is Chuck Schumer at 66. No equivalent of a Bill Clinton or a John F.
Kennedy exists, combining youth and new ideas.
Part of the reason that the Democratic leadership seems like the old Soviet Politburo circa 1982 is that the party suffered such devastating defeats down ballot during the Obama years. The great, unspoken legacy of the previous president is a Democratic Party that is tattered, shattered, and consists of old people squabbling for power.
