Kicking Ass and Taking Names

Happy belated birthday Speaker Pelosi!  I apologize for missing your 70th birthday, but I’m glad that DailyKos was there to send you 2600 roses.  I hope someday I get to do something as awesome as marshaling health care reform, so that I too get a whole bunch of roses from a political blog.

Madam Speaker, for your birthday I want to thank you for teaching me two valuable lessons about tenacity and persistance.  Writing a thesis on you was not easy.  I analyzed you and reanalyzed you.  Sometimes it seemed like you owned my soul.  I thought of you as a frenemy, but I would do it all over again.  Hell, I’d write a dissertation on you.  Getting the chance to contribute something to the study of political women kept me going for that year.  I think many women could learn so much from you about leadership, and well, kicking ass and taking names.  And, in our youth-obsessed culture, you’ve shown that people can have a rich and exciting career no matter your age.

People can say rude things about women, especially about our looks and how we dress.  One of the things I learned while studying your career was how much our appearance is a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.  But you embrace it and use fashion like armor–you always look classy and in control.  Botox shmotox, who cares!  You pushed through legislation that really matters to regular people.  The haters (err, Republicans) can say what they want, calling this Armeggedon or socialism, but we know that 50 years from now people are going to look back on this time as the advent of good change for millions of Americans.  Social Security, Medicare, now health care reform.  People probably won’t remember what you looked like when you made history.  As the Los Angeles Times recently wrote about you:

 No speaker in the past century has played such a key role in enacting major reforms. No speaker since Henry Clay, who wielded the gavel in the 1810s and ’20s, has had so great an effect on American life.

Seriously, who remembers what Henry Clay wore when he wielded the gavel?  Considering that he was kicking ass and taking names in the early 1800s, I’m guessing that he, like most people back then, didn’t bathe every day.  I bet he smelled.

Thank you for seeing it through and making it happen.  It’s not perfect and I still think there should be Medicare for all, but for now this will do.  Let’s just hope that future leaders can use their hearts and their heads when making public policy.

Happy Birthday!