The left bank of the "main stream"

Debra Saunders:

It is a sign of how out-of-touch San Francisco is from the rest of the country when most voters here consider House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a moderate. No, make that: too moderate.

Pelosi's positions are those of a classic liberal. She voted against the welfare-reform bill signed by President Bill Clinton and supports same-sex marriage. She wants choice for children who don't want to notify their parents to have an abortion, but not for poor District of Columbia parents who need vouchers to send their children to private school. Pelosi voted against the war in Iraq and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Her 2005 liberal rating by Americans for Democratic Action was 95 percent.

She is happy to dismiss President Bush as an idiot -- or, as she said in 2004, Bush "has no judgment, no experience or knowledge of the subjects that he has decided upon." From the other side of her mouth, she promises to restore "civility" to the House if she becomes its first female speaker.

That's what passes for moderate in The Special City. Locals are proud of their country's leftmost leanings -- until Fox News' Bill O'Reilly lampoons "San Francisco values." Then they move into high dudgeon that anyone would brand Ess Eff politics as out of the mainstream.

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Pelosi is likely to be the hammer in skirts. She seems to dart between cluelessness and hyperbole. She sides with those who want to lose the war in Iraq because it will push their left wing foreign policy agenda to lose. She was wrong on welfare reform and remains wrong on Social Security reform. She has been consistently wrong on taxes and war, but she is not always wrong enough for her constituents.