Brian Semple
Nancy Pelosi: the woman Republicans love to hate.
The ongoing spat between the CIA and Nancy Pelosi over whether she was briefed by the Bush administration on waterboarding has left the speaker of the US house of representatives stuck in the firing line of conservatives.
Pelosi, the highest ranking female politician in American history and bete noire of the GOP, has accused the CIA of lying about its use of waterboarding, an allegation the CIA rejects. The dispute has galvanised Republicans, who are struggling to take on Obama, and are demanding that Pelosi either produces evidence that congress was misled by the CIA or apologizes.
It is an apt moment to revisit James Crabtree’s profile of Pelosi from Prospect December 2006, a watermark moment in US politics when it became clear that power was slipping away from the Republican party. Crabtree describes how Pelosi’s rise to prominence was indicative of this seachange in Washington and within the Democrat party:
She could hardly be more different from Bill Clinton, the last Democrat to turn back the conservative tide. Clinton, a southern centrist, was a natural communicator who enjoyed reaching across party lines. Pelosi is a partisan west-coast liberal, uneasy on television and unwilling to work with Republicans on principle. Indeed, the only similarity between the two is a mutual talent for raising vast quantities of money.
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Mary Fitzgerald
Contrary to popular legend, Americans read and write more than Europeans
America may be moving to the left under Obama; indeed, as Newsweek put it, Americans are “all socialists now” and due to become “even more French” in the decade to come. Despite this, it’s still widely assumed, on both sides of the Atlantic, that Europe and America are essentially different—in their economies, societies and values. Americans have greater wealth inequality, pollute more and are much more religious, or so the logic goes.
This is a myth, argues Peter Baldwin—professor of history at UCLA and author of several books on the subject—in his essay for Prospect this month. It’s a myth that has long been politically expedient to play on—in Europe, the purveyors of anti-Americanism in Europe know that nothing unites like a common enemy, especially as Europeans are unable to agree on anything else. Meanwhile, being “too European” is a stick Obama’s right-wing opponents are fond of beating him with. But if one looks at the raw data on four key areas: the economy, social policy, the environment and—hardest of all to measure—religious and cultural attitudes, one sees, Baldwin says, that “Europe and the US are, in fact, parts of a common, big-tent grouping—call it the west, the Atlantic community, or the developed world.”
More interesting still, if one removes the predominantly black urban underclass (dealt an atrociously bad hand by history and by the racism that prevails today) from the crime, poverty and education stastics, American and European societies become even more indistinct. As Europe assimilates more and more immigrants, this is something Europeans would do well to take note of…
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