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Does Nancy Pelosi Deserve to Keep her Job?

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi at her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill in February.Credit...Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.

First. Facebook’s privacy violations have led to a #DeleteFacebook campaign. “It is time,” Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, which was sold to Facebook for $19 billion, writes.

But Slate’s April Glaser argues that deletion is a privilege that many people, like small-business owners, can’t afford. The solution, she says, isn’t to abandon Facebook — which probably isn’t realistic on a mass scale anyway. The solution is to fix Facebook.

“If you think Facebook is worth deleting over its issues, then call your elected official to regulate the company, as well as other companies, like Google, that profit from harvesting our personal details to sell ads tailored to us across the internet,” Glaser writes. “Because it’s becoming clearer that we can’t trust these companies to regulate themselves.”

The Pelosi question. A few years ago, Steve Cohen — a Democratic congressman from Memphis — had some buttons made. Each button said, “PelosiCare,” underneath a photo of Nancy Pelosi. At the bottom of the button, in smaller type, were the words “I was there.”

The point was clear enough. Everyone else may refer to the huge expansion of health insurance as Obamacare. But the Democratic members of Congress who voted for it know that it would not have happened without Pelosi. When Obama administration officials wavered over whether to keep pushing for such an ambitious bill, Pelosi bucked them up. Then she delivered the votes to pass the bill.

That’s been the pattern since Pelosi became the Democrats’ House leader in 2003. She pushes hard for liberal policies, but also has a keen understanding of what legislation can’t get through Congress, no matter how much she may personally favor it. She has probably done a better job of keeping her caucus unified, in the majority and minority, than any other recent congressional leader. “She has been an extraordinarily effective caucus leader,” as Jonathan Chait writes in New York magazine.

Pelosi’s leadership does come with downsides, though. She is unpopular in much of the country, and she hasn’t figured out how to win enough elections to retake control of the House since Democrats lost it in 2010. As a result, there is growing talk about whether she should step aside.

Why is Pelosi unpopular? For starters, it’s normal for House leaders to become unpopular over time, as Matthew Green noted on the Monkey Cage blog (with a nice comparative chart). Pelosi has also made some mistakes, mishandling the recent John Conyers sexual-harassment case and, as Gail Collins notes, failing to provide leadership paths for younger House members.

But Pelosi’s unpopularity also feels different. She has remained the Republicans’ favorite bogeywoman — appearing in ad after ad — long after the Democrats were last in the majority and she was speaker. Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate leader, never became the target that Pelosi did, nor has Chuck Schumer, Reid’s successor.

In an Atlantic piece, Peter Beinart lays out some strong evidence that sexism is a major reason. Beinart walks through the data on Republican ads that feature Pelosi as well as the social-science research on the prejudices that voters hold against female politicians. “For women politicians to succeed, they must defeat and outmaneuver men,” Beinart writes. “Yet the better at it they are, the more detested they become.”

Whatever the cause of her unpopularity, Democrats still have a dilemma: Is she the best House leader for the party?

My own view is that Pelosi should remain in her job at least through this year’s campaign. She probably doesn’t actually influence many voters, Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg points out. And her effectiveness in holding together her caucus should not be taken for granted, as Chait notes.

If the Democrats fail to win back the House this year, Pelosi will probably step aside, and she should. If they win, she’ll deserve to be the speaker again. Pelosi will also turn 78 next week, and she would do her party a favor by starting to think about a succession plan. If she were to step aside by the end of 2020, she would have had an 18-year run as her party’s House leader — one of the most successful tenures in modern politics.

Elsewhere, Elena Schneider and Heather Caygle of Politico explain why more Democratic candidates are disavowing Pelosi, and Bernstein, in that Bloomberg piece, argues Pelosi should stay but her 78-year-old deputy, Steny Hoyer, should go.

Programming note. I’ll be away next week, but the newsletter will continue. My colleague Ian Prasad Philbrick will give you a couple of reading suggestions based on the day’s news. I will also have an item in each day’s newsletter, writing about a topic that I find important but haven’t found room to mention in the newsletter so far, given the pace of news.

You can join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook. I am also writing a daily email newsletter and invite you to subscribe.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).

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