Well, she isn’t. Back in the Obama administration, in an incident that few but I remember, Nancy insisted that the federal budget was a lean, mean spendin’ machine with literally no fat at all: “The cupboard is bare,” quoth Nancy, back in 2013. “There's no more cuts to make.”
You have to give credit to a female politician so willing to make a point that she’ll take a chance on sounding like Old Mother Hubbard, but nowadays she’s willing to sound like the rich man’s shill, pumping for a billionaire-friendly change to the tax code as a recession-fighting measure, to wit: repealing the provision added to the tax code by Donald Trump and the Republicans that limits to $10,000 the amount of “SALT” deductions (state and local taxes) an individual can apply to their taxable federal income.
Now, the original, unlimited deduction was written into the tax code from the very beginning, under the reasonable assumption that the state and local taxes you pay are not “income” to you, and the whole point of changing it was to punish rich blue states like New York and California for pursuing bad “liberal” policies, but Nancy could have waited for a more, well, “politic” time to propose a change. Well, she could have. But one reason that Nancy is such an effective leader—and she most definitely is an effective leader, is that she commands an enormous amount of money. “Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” said another effective Californian, Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh, speaker of the California Assembly back in the day.1 And, to be an effective leader, sometimes you can’t be afraid to look tacky.
1. Big Daddy also said of lobbyists: “If you can’t take their money, drink their booze, sleep with their women, and then look them in the eye and vote the other way, you don’t belong up here,” (“here” being Sacramento, the California state capital), definitely a thought out of season.
