Lexington, from the Economist, comes up with a few more reasons why Nancy Pelosi should be kicked in the crotch:
The Californication of the Democratic Party carries all sorts of risks. The most obvious is that California has the most dysfunctional politics in the country. The Golden State has one of the highest unemployment rates in America, at 9.3%, thanks to its high taxes, its unions, its anti-business climate and its gigantic housing bubble. Some 100,000 people have fled the state each year since the early 2000s. More would follow if they could sell their houses. A second risk is party disunity. The rise of the Californians has already produced bloodshed: Mrs Pelosi beat Martin Frost, a Texan moderate, for the leadership, and Mr Waxman dethroned John Dingell, from Michigan, for the chairmanship of the energy committee. Sherrod Brown, a senator for Ohio, and Debbie Stabenow, a senator for Michigan, have both worried aloud about overzealous environmental legislation and the coastal bias against manufacturing.
The biggest risk is overreach. Many Californian liberals are as far to the left on cultural issues as the southern Republicans were to the right. Many of them also draw their support from two groups that have limited appeal to the rest of the country, particularly to the “bitter” voters that Mr Obama had such trouble wooing in November; the fabulously rich and public-sector activists.
All this suggests that one of Mr Obama’s most delicate tasks, if he wants to prevent his party from being captured by the “left coast” in the same way that the Republicans were captured by the South, will be to contain the Californian barons. He has plenty of advantages when it comes to performing such a task. Chicago is not San Francisco. And Mr Obama did remarkably well in the South, capturing Virginia and North Carolina and coming within five points of taking Georgia. But putting just one person with a southern drawl in his cabinet might have helped.