Pelosi vs. AOC

Nancy Pelosi protects the rich donors who control the Democratic Party. That's her role as the principal elected official of the party. Sometimes she is an effective critic of Trump. But for the most part she suffocates any progressive breath in her caucus.

On Sunday Maureen Dowd published a column "It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade" in which the speaker is quoted dismissing "the squad" -- Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York , Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts -- as basically inconsequential, that it has no support in congress.

Pelosi comments have created a furor:

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, went much further, arguing in a series of tweets that his boss and her first-term colleagues were better at leading than Ms. Pelosi was, that Democratic leaders were not willing to fight for their principles, and that the speaker had failed to deliver any Democratic victories while shrinking from impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump.

“Pelosi claims we can’t focus on impeachment because it’s a distraction from kitchen table issues,” Mr. Chakrabarti wrote. “But I’d challenge you to find voters that can name a single thing House Democrats have done for their kitchen table this year. What is this legislative mastermind doing?”

The ray of sunshine here is that Pelosi is gone as speaker after 2020. That was the deal she cut to become speaker again after the Democrats took the majority following the 2018 Blue Wave.

If only "the squad" were more radical. Right now AOC is better than nothing. Same with Omar and Tlaib. Let them go to war with Pelosi. It would do the party a lot of good.