By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Longtime Democrats who have become disgusted with or left that political party could be the basis of powerful campaign commercials for the other side in the 2018 midterm elections, to hold the mirror up to what that party has become, if only Republican media strategy will show the courage of GOP platform convictions.
In one recent incident, toxic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of San Francisco, was heckled at a February 20 Phoenix gathering by a lifelong Democrat who had been won over by Donald Trump.
As multimillionaire Pelosi recited the standard leftwing resentment of wealthy people, a Latina in the audience called out, “How much are you worth, Nancy? Do you live in abject poverty?” Pelosi shrugged her off, cluelessly saying that “we’re not talking about that.”
Shortly thereafter, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website reported on February 27 that when six Democratic candidates for Congress in southeastern Arizona’s Second District, which includes some of generally liberal Tucson, were asked at a forum if they’d support Pelosi to be speaker of the House, none of them raised their hands, causing a burst of audience applause.
However, the Free Beacon added, the staff of one of the six, Ann Kirkpatrick, later said she had misunderstood and did support Pelosi.
Earlier in February, a lifelong Democrat and mayor of Quincy, in the predominantly Democratic state of Massachusetts, announced that he had left the party because of its leftward march, including on the issue of permissive abortion.
The Quincy Patriot Ledger newspaper posted on February 7 that the city official, Tom Koch, a Catholic, said, “The party platform is so far left on abortion, it’s sickening.”
The story said Koch decided “I guess that’s the last straw for me” when Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman and former U.S. secretary of Labor for Barack Obama, said last year that the party has no room for pro-life people.
Perez later tried to backpedal a bit when the implications of losing still more offended voters sank in for him, but the former cabinet official for the radically pro-abortion Obama had said what he really thinks about the need to shove permissive abortion down the throat of not only every Democrat but “every American.”
The Conservative Politics blog noted that “Quincy is in the heart of what could arguably be the most reliably Democrat part of the country: the immediate Boston area.”
Perhaps Koch’s disclosure will encourage still more Democrats to depart from a party they still feel some cultural tie to, even though its militant leftism placed it at odds with most if not everything they stand for.
The Patriot Ledger said Koch is a supporter of traditional Democratic economic stands, but the newspaper quoted one Massachusetts political science professor that “there used to be more room in the Democratic Party for blue-collar Democrats like Koch who are more socially conservative, but the party in recent years has put an increased importance on progressive positions on social issues.”
The story said Koch was only 10 years old when the U.S. Supreme Court imposed nationwide abortion in 1973, but he realized this was “a big issue in my house,” and that his own father stopped actively working with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s campaign when Kennedy later came out for permissive abortion.
At Pelosi’s Phoenix “town hall,” reported to be a small gathering of about 100 people, the Democratic minority leader, nearly 78 years old, once again brought up the apparently unrelated fact that she’s the mother of five offspring as a way to deflect criticism of her.
When pro-lifers in audiences in the past have criticized Pelosi’s radical pro-abortionism, the Californian shot back about having borne five children — as an apparent justification for however many millions of preborn children she helps to deprive of life now.
In Phoenix, though, having cited her fecundity, Pelosi added, “I can speak louder than anybody” — apparently meaning that having perfected her ability to outshout the cacophony of a young household, she could shout down the Latina challenger if necessary who had raised the topic of Pelosi’s own wealth.
Pelosi had been reciting talking points against Donald Trump’s tax cuts that were supposed to cast the president as a foe of bipartisan “national values” that make the country strong and build for the future.
However, instead of framing the issue positively as multibillionaire Trump does — about wanting to increase wealth for everyone by boosting the economy — the very rich Pelosi fell back on standard Democrat rhetoric about some people having far too much wealth, while others struggle in “abject, deadening poverty.”
Pelosi has complained publicly that Trump’s tax cuts will give people only “crumbs.” One thousand dollars or more a year may seem like crumbs to the very rich like Pelosi, but it’s a significant amount to many ordinary wage-earners.
Class War
The Phoenix incident received a bit of national attention.
Under the headline “Nancy Pelosi’s class-war handicap,” an editorial posted by the New York Post on February 22 said, “Rather than insulting voters’ intelligence by insisting they’re not benefiting from an average tax cut of $1,600, maybe Pelosi should stay home — at either of her two houses, or at the vineyard she also owns.”
Multimillionaire Pelosi bemoaning wealth while hugging mountains of personal money — as many Democrat luminaries do — apparently was too much for the Latina, who was identified by the online Arizona Daily Independent news site as Terry Mendoza.
The next day, February 21, conservative radio talk host James T. Harris, of the Phoenix-based KFYI (550 AM), interviewed Mendoza, who said she is a lifelong Democrat from Los Angeles who moved to the large Phoenix suburb of Mesa.
Mendoza said she didn’t like how much money she was having to pay for health care, so she researched the matter to learn how Obamacare caused the burden. She said she also researched about illegal immigration, and had asked members of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C., last month why they prefer having illegal entrants in the U.S.
President Trump had won her over, Mendoza said.
The Wanderer attempted to reach Mendoza through KFYI but was unsuccessful.
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