Nancy Pelosi has something of a reputation as a political genius. 

I have always thought of that as, at best, an exaggeration. She certainly has a string of political victories to look back upon, but while she plays the inside game well enough, her roots as a San Francisco liberal and her poor political judgment will tarnish her reputation in the coming years. 

"It’s high time to shatter the myth of Nancy Pelosi as a master strategist. Nobody deserves more blame than the ridiculously self-titled “speaker emerita” for the Democrats’ $1 billion electoral collapse." @mirandadevine https://t.co/Orfzutmk7m

— Mr Producer (@RichSementa) November 18, 2024

Miranda Devine hits the nail on the head in her column at The New York Post. Pelosi's political skill is not aimed at winning in the conventional sense, nor does she excel at persuading her colleagues. She gets ahead by being vicious and amoral. 

It’s high time to shatter the myth of Nancy Pelosi as a master strategist. Nobody deserves more blame than the ridiculously self-titled “speaker emerita” for the Democrats’ $1 billion electoral collapse. 

Under her ruthless leadership, her party lost the White House, the House, the Senate and the popular vote. You can’t say that enough. 

Voters rejected the Dems from coast to coast, even in Pelosi’s deepest-blue home city of San Francisco, which saw a 7-point swing to Donald Trump.

She’s the only speaker in history to have lost control of the House twice. 

She’s finished. 

The empress emeritus has no clothes (perish the thought). 

Pelosi, at least as much as any other Democrat, was the architect of the Biden regency and the Biden-directed coup. She led the war against Donald Trump in his first administration, helped install the most vicious and amoral politician in America (Adam Schiff) as a Senator from California, and set the stage for the electoral disaster facing the Democrats today. 

In other words, her political victories were not only bad for America, but will turn out to be horrible for the Democratic Party in the long run. 

“I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity,” she told the Guardian before the election when she was trying to justify the coup against Biden, her former longtime friend who, she kept lying, was “sharp as a tack” until he fell apart on live TV.

With her party in ruins, pent-up frustration with Pelosi’s iron grip and flawed judgment is starting to find voice. Expect it to get louder as her efforts to offload blame on Biden leave a sour taste in the mouths of party loyalists. 

Since the humiliating defeat, Pelosi has been filmed publicly squabbling with Donna Brazile, has traded barbs with Bernie Sanders and has been ripped on “The View” and MSNBC. The Washington Post fact-checker even awarded her “Four Pinocchios” for lying that illegal migration was worse under Trump than Biden.

“The View” co-host Ana Navarro called Pelosi “nasty” for telling the New York Times that the Dems would have won if Biden had quit sooner. 

“She wants to make sure people know it wasn’t her, [that] she has no blame in this. … It’s really unseemly.” 

Pelosi has already filed to run in the next election but may decide to change her mind as her colleagues turn on her. Just as nothing succeeds like success, everybody runs away from failures and looks for a scapegoat. And Nancy Pelosi will be more than a scapegoat because she was the architect of a strategy that has led to ruin for her party. 

All her hatred, the impeachments and lawfare and jailing of Trump allies, served neither her party nor the country. Trump is back, better than ever, her party is in ruins and the country has been through hell for four years.

At the DNC convention that anointed Kamala Harris as their doomed presidential candidate, Dems were seen sporting buttons featuring Pelosi and the word “Godmother” with her face on a poster for the iconic Mafia movie “The Godfather.” If that’s not an admission that she still runs the party like a Mafia don, nothing is.

It is true that she is a formidable leader in the Genghis Khan mold, as one GOP semi-admirer describes her. But what good were her dictatorial skills to the party she led off a cliff? 

Pelosi may be a worthy acolyte of Machiavelli, both in the sense of ignoring morality and ruling for one's own benefit. She has never been concerned about anything but her own power and wealth and those of her allies. She famously trades on inside information, excels at bullying (and blackmailing?) her colleagues, and knows how to shove the worst ideas through Congress. 

What she doesn't know how to do is make things better, and that reality has come back to bite the Democrats in the backside.