Giant Slayer: A Ron Paul Republican Seeks to Unseat Pelosi

Given the immense difficulty in unseating a sitting Speaker of the House, the June 8 primary battle between Republicans John Dennis and Dana Walsh in Nancy Pelosi’s 8th congressional district in San Francisco — a district that voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama while giving Pelosi 72 percent of the vote in 2008 — wouldn’t warrant much attention were it not for the fact that the two candidates combined have already raised more than two million dollars.

The two GOP candidates vying for the seat of the most powerful Democratic member of the House couldn’t be more different, not only from Speaker Pelosi but from each other.

“We are running this campaign to win,” says, John Dennis, a 46-year-old entrepreneur and real estate investor making his debut as a candidate. “We’re trying to make this a national campaign.”

Dennis isn’t your typical Republican. A founder of San Francisco’s Republican Liberty Caucus, Dennis enjoys the backing of libertarian-leaning Republican congressman Ron Paul, whose presidential campaign he actively supported in 2008. Like the iconoclastic Texas lawmaker, Dennis wants to shrink the size of the federal government and abolish the Departments of Commerce, Education and Agriculture.

Like the 74-year-old Paul, Dennis also opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is critical of certain provisions of the Patriot Act. He also wants to audit the Federal Reserve.

Unlike Pelosi’s previous Republican challengers, Dennis is personally pro-choice and doesn’t have a problem with same-sex marriage. He also favors the legalization of marijuana — issues that should resonate in that left-leaning district.

He has reportedly raised a half-million dollars, more than eighty percent coming from outside California.

Meanwhile, Dana Walsh, Dennis’ primary opponent, is waging her second campaign for Pelosi’s seat. An interior designer servicing both commercial and residential clients, Walsh finished a distant third in the 2008 congressional campaign, polling a paltry 9.7 percent, while lagging nearly 20,000 votes behind antiwar candidate Cindy Sheehan. Sheehan netted 46,118 votes while running as an independent that year.

Undeterred, Walsh is running hard and had already raised $1.4 million as of March 31, according to the latest FEC quarterly filing.

Taking a hard-line on immigration, the 57-year-old Republican supports the War on Terror and a strong national defense. Believing that Speaker Pelosi and President Obama want to “vilify and punish corporate America,” she opposes Cap and Trade legislation and supports the construction of new nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, including drilling in Alaska’s North Slope. She also favors a balanced budget.

Walsh realizes that she’s probably out of step with the majority in her district. Noting Pelosi’s abysmal approval rating in national polls, she says that she wishes she was running against Pelosi nationally instead of in one of the bluest districts in the country.

Despite her relatively impressive fundraising prowess, Walsh’s traditional conservatism isn’t likely to excite too many San Francisco voters. Her “small government” rhetoric rings hollow compared to that of her primary opponent. Critics say her nomination would virtually guarantee a yawner in November — another seventy percent showing for the Speaker.

With the exceptions of Pennsylvania’s Galusha A. Grow — an antislavery Democrat-turned-Republican member of Congress — who was defeated as a sitting Speaker of the House in 1862 and, more recently, the narrow loss of thirty-year House veteran Tom Foley to George Nethercutt in 1994, it has been virtually impossible to dislodge a Speaker of the House at the ballot box as far back as the Civil War. It almost never happens.

Barring a major scandal, this year probably won’t be any different, but a victory in the GOP primary by political newcomer John Dennis — a libertarian Republican with unmistakably liberal leanings — would at least make this race fun to watch this fall.