This reminds me of nothing so much as Hubert Humphrey's call for a "politics of joy" after the King assassination.
Took me a while to figure out exactly why Pelosi's call for national unity struck me so weird, but a piece of it just dropped.
Nancy Pelosi is herself one of the boogeymen of today's Republican Party, one of their prime targets.
I mean, this was just two days ago.
There are lots of people (I'm emphatically not one of them, btw) who say that Nancy Pelosi should step down from her House leadership role because she herself is so divisive—that Dems would have an easier road to winning the House without her as Speaker-presumptive.
Clearly, Pelosi thinks this is hogwash. If she believed it, she'd step down. And she clearly doesn't imagine that she can win over her hardest-core opponents. She doesn't want unity with those folks. She wants to beat them. As she freaking should.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right," Lincoln said in his second inaugural, "let us strive on to finish the work we are in."
Lincoln was talking about winning a war there. A shooting war. And he knew that you have to win victory before you can bind up the nation's wounds.
So yes, let's do, as Lincoln urged, "all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." And let's begin that process by defeating and repudiating Trump and his supporters in the GOP.
