Opinion

Nancy Pelosi’s Begging For Money Is A Bad Example For The Youth

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will accept an Excellence In Leadership award from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce next week in the well-known Spanish barrio of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Before Pelosi jets off to the Grand America Hotel for the three-day affair alongside former San Antonio mayor turned Obama Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro (to honor “corporate advocate of the year” Kathleen Martinez from the oil spill company BP), the House Democrat showed off some of her amazing business skills.

“Please don’t say no Patrick” she begged me in the subject line of her Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraising email Sunday night.

“You’ve been getting a lot of emails asking you to join our campaign to defeat Koch Brothers-backed Republicans. Please, don’t say no again.”

I used to think it was somewhat funny the way Democrats send out their congressional fundraising emails this year with dire subject lines: “everything just failed,” “we will fail,” “We’ve got nothing left Patrick,” “we BEGGED you Patrick,” “All Hope Is Lost.”

But after I get home from a walk around the city of Washington, D.C. — a walk on which I’ve just been begged a handful of times for money or food, primarily from young people — I see now the influence that these kinds of tactics are having on our society as a whole. If even Nancy Pelosi can beg, then why can’t I?

But here’s the thing, as reported breathlessly by a Virginia-based publication, Pelosi personally raised $400 million during her party leadership career to rank behind the Clintons and Barack Obama as one of the top fundraisers in the history of the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi’s begging has worked.

Compare Pelosi’s subject lines to a joke from another onetime top Democratic fundraiser, John F. Kennedy, told at a Gridiron Dinner in 1958: “I just received the following wire from my generous daddy — ‘Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.'”

You didn’t see Kennedy openly begging for money in emails that get sent out to intellectually developing college kids on progressive email databases. If the Democratic Party’s fundraising tactics tell us anything, we certainly have changed the way we think about money in this country.

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