San Fran Nan's Cash Can

As the election nears, column inches and news-time electrons dedicated to Nancy Pelosi are on the increase, understandably so, since San Fran Nan could be House Leader for the next two years.

So, I've been poking around OpenSecrets.org's Nancy Pelosi pages to get a sense of all the beholden-to's of the possible future speaker. Some items of note:

She spends freely, with hundreds of campaigns and Democratic committees benefitting from the largess her campaign income of $1,215,545 in the last year provides her. In addition to the dozens of $2,000 to $4,000 checks she signed for various campaigns, she gave the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee $587,939 to to dole out in her name.

She plays the politics of favors, and she's building big bank accounts there -- so when she wants to push her agenda, she'll have favors to collect.

Abortion is so central to her thinking that it is the single biggest expenditure she made in the last cycle - $25K to a front of Planned Parenthood to stop Prop. 73, the parental notification initiative on California's last ballot. Her contribution helped; California parents still aren't notified if their minor child is seeking an abortion.

And if you wonder why she stays so on-point, almost as if she were GOP not DNC, you might look to the $45K in checks she wrote to Fenton Communications, the fiercely partisan Dem PR firm.

As for where her money comes from, she may laugh about her #1 contributor being Big Oil -- albeit the whacky Occidental Petroleum sort of Big Oil -- but scan through her contributors and you see union, union, union, union. That's why one of her goals for her first 100 hours -- not days -- as Speaker is passing a minimum wage hike.

With campaign news getting drearier and drearier, it's stuff like that that the GOP rank and file need to understand. Who cares whether they're excited about the election or not? They need to schlubb themselves to the polls, ignore all they're angry at the GOP about, and vote GOP.

Related Tags: Politics, Public affairs, Pelosi, DCCC