Up to here with Nancy

This comes from a Southern white male who is not angry about all this liberalism. He, in fact, has spent most of his adult life advocating in that general direction, notwithstanding the occasional veer.

He holds no regard for the blustery right wing. He laments the nonsensical superficiality of the Tea Party. He thinks Fox News is a disgrace.

He loves San Francisco. He deems Barack Obama a centrist. He thinks homosexuals ought to be able to get married. He believes that women and their doctors should be able to choose abortions. He believes scientists instead of political demagogues on whether the climate is changing.

With that context established, and with the understanding that the preceding amounted to self-reference in the third person, let me say this: Nancy Pelosi is starting to make me ill.

Practically everyone who ever lost at anything can make a case that the outcome was unjust and did not accurately reflect relative worthiness or skill.

Jimmy Carter can tell you why he was a good president. Boise State can tell you why it ought to be No. 1.

But that does not change the score, which is to be lived with, not dismissed by the power of denial.

If you are the leader of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and if, in an election, the opposition makes you the issue, however unfairly, and if your party then loses 60 seats and its majority, then you have, quite simply, confronted a score that cannot be changed and must be lived with.

That is to say Pelosi should step politely to the side to let her party present the face of new leadership. She should offer her legendary insider skills as a vote-counter and legislative tactician in quiet mentoring service to her successor.

For her to run to be minority leader, and almost assuredly win, is to burden her party with her extreme unpopularity while also embedding -- no, exacerbating -- the dreaded polarization of her party as representing a narrowing niche covering urban areas, heavy minority populations and unions.

The future for real political viability, even dominance, in this country -- to the extent if might be achieved at all amid this blustery madness -- lies in a new politics that will advance a deft combination of credible deficit-reduction and generational advancement in our social and cultural tolerance, primarily regarding gays, though not exclusively so.

Republicans are perhaps moving on the deficit-reduction side, but they can never execute this combination so long as they remain hostage to the close-minded religious right that believes it is specially authorized by God to impose his will on public policy.

Democrats hold the strong generational advantage on social tolerance. But they can never move credibly on deficit-reduction so long as Pelosi is the one responding on their behalf when the president's bipartisan commission on deficit reduction leaks a preliminary draft of its report that advances the powerful mathematical concept that we need to get more money into Social Security and reduce the rate at which money is going out of it.

"Simply unacceptable," declared Pelosi forthwith, reaching deep into the dated Democratic playbook for her most trusted cliché. She said these recommendations would violate our solemn contract with our seniors.

What did she find so unacceptable? Only tame and sane notions such as these: Raising the retirement age to 69 over the next 65 years; tying annual Social Security payments to actual inflation, not wage growth; and taxing income in excess of $106,000, now exempt, to increase contributions to Social Security.

What will truly violate our solemn contract with seniors is imposing such a political drag on your party that you let the Tea Party fester to the point that it privatizes and ruins Social Security.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.