“She was too busy eating ice cream and getting her hair done to say this for several months,” says Ben Shapiro. It’s actually worse than that, notes Drew Holden. At times Pelosi has sounded quite sanguine about destruction to property by left-wingers.

“People will do what they do,” said the California Democrat.

She was responding to a question about a 14-foot, marble statue of Christopher Columbus erected in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood in 1984. A mob of protesters pulled the statue down on the Fourth of July and dumped it into the Inner Harbor. Parts of the statue have been retrieved.

Pelosi said, “It would have been a good idea” for city officials to take down the statue “from a safety standpoint” if the community does not want it, even if it is not formally decided to remove it.

“It could just be a community view,” Pelosi said. “If the community doesn’t want the statue, the statue shouldn’t be there.”

Sounds like she’s since seen some ominous polling on the “law and order” issue, Holden adds. Could be. Although this result, out today from KFF and the Cook Political Report, isn’t too bad for Democrats. Biden’s a point ahead of Trump in Sun Belt states on who’d handle “criminal justice and policing” better.

That jibes with some other recent polls, like the one of Wisconsin that the Times published last weekend. On balance Wisconsinites thought that Biden hadn’t done enough to condemn the sort of violence they experienced in Kenosha, but he ran slightly ahead of Trump on who’d better handle “law and order” because people think he’d do a better job of lowering the temperature culturally.

On the other hand, this new one from SurveyMonkey and Axios shows a major problem for Democrats potentially:

Democrats are counting on white suburbanites to be the difference for them in November the same way they were in 2018, especially given Biden’s weak performance with Latinos. He’s ahead right now only because he’s more than offsetting his losses among minority groups with gains among the GOP’s much bigger constituency of whites. If that changes, all bets are off. What Axios’s data tells us is that there’s real potential for it to change; if anything happens between now and Election Day to make suburbanites feel less safe, there could be a major shift towards Trump.

Anyway, whatever her motivation, it’s nice of Pelosi to get around to denouncing rioting some four months or so after it started.

.@SpeakerPelosi says looting, arson, and rioting "should be prosecuted. That is lawlessness." pic.twitter.com/WF3SVXSwha

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 17, 2020