Nancy Pelosi, Victim of Conservative "Caricature"
Kate Zernike takesThursday's front-page with her "Woman in the News" profile of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the liberal Congresswoman from San Francisco poised to become speaker of the House ("Ready to Be Voice of the Majority").
Since press coverage has begun focusing on Pelosi, Zernike's reportinghas developed anannoyingtic - that Pelosi's liberalism is more a conservative-inspired caricature than a real thing. Today Zernike employs the word for the third time in recent days. "Ms. Pelosi, 66, who has been a San Francisco congresswoman for 20 years, became minority leader and then guided her caucus to victory by enforcing remarkable party discipline. She curbed the demands of those who share her often-caricatured liberal values, while making a place for the party's conservatives, for whom San Francisco is sometimes as distant as the moon."
Few complaints appearin the Times thatRepublicans are being"caricatured as conservative" by Democrats - yet the Times is eager to defend liberals like Hillary Clinton when Republicans dare to use the L-word to characterize her politics.
And for the second time in recent days, Zernike misleadingly calls the anti-war liberal hero Rep. John Murtha "conservative: "While she had long opposed the war, she also realized that a liberal congresswoman from California would have little impact in speaking out against it. And she pushed back against liberal members of her party who wanted to protest by denying financing for the war. Instead, she worked quietly with Representative John P. Murtha, a conservative Democrat from Pennsylvania and a veteran who had supported the war, to get him to express his growing doubts about it."
