Sheehan taking names, dollars for independent race against Pelosi

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan: Photo by Getty ImagesEx-“peace mom” Cindy Sheehan claims she has a $130,000 war chest for her independent campaign against what she calls, “Nancy Pelosi and her cabal in San Francisco.”

“I’m not just running against Nancy Pelosi,” Sheehan said in a radio interview this week. “I’m running against the two-party system, the entire system.”

The popular Pelosi's Democratic primary challenger is Shirley Golub, a local businesswoman and 2004 Kucinich presidential campaign volunteer. Republican businesswoman Dana Walsh, who is active in the city’s GOP Central Committee, faces no primary challengers for what is basically Pelosi’s locked-up, 8th congressional district seat. Nonetheless, Walsh’s campaign site proclaims: “I’m running against two of the most dangerous women in America…Nancy Pelosi, Cindy Sheehan and their Democrat comrades are invested in failure.”

Sheehan is saving her salvos for ongoing signature-gathering and post-June campaigning and claims she has raised $130,000 through mostly small, often $60 donations. “We’ll come out hitting hard between June and November,” Sheehan said. “At that point in June we will have a very solid foundation of support, of a real grasp of the issues in the 8th district. We had to bring our activism and politics down from an international scope to a very local scope.”

Her activist friends in San Francisco are her 8th District base and many share Sheehan’s clamor for impeachment and they all seemingly share a near-hatred for Pelosi for taking impeachment off the table. But bold talk about resurrecting impeachment doesn’t phase the nation’s most powerful woman.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill told PolitickerCA.com via e-mail: “The Speaker shares the frustration of many San Franciscans and those across the country about the President's lack of leadership and his refusal to end this war. She will continue to lead legislative efforts for a new direction in Iraq but believes that impeachment would create a divisive battle, be a distraction from Congress’s efforts to chart a new course for America’s working families and would ultimately fail.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Sheehan must gather more than 10,000 signatures by Aug. 8 to run against the House Speaker. Sheehan has established residency in San Francisco's Hispanic-and-lesbian rich Mission District, moving into that neighborhood from semi-rural Dixon, near Sacramento. Her campaign office is on a stretch of Mission Street paralleling Market Street, near the Civic Center.