Following the fourth election loss for Democrats running for seats in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is defiant in her determination to hold onto the power she wields as Minority Leader — even as pundits and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle assert that her days are numbered.

“Not every politician — let alone one who operates on a national stage, like Pelosi — is willing to brandish her brass knuckles in public with a smirk, confident that she wouldn’t suffer from doing so,” Jonathan Tobin, opinion editor of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review Online, wrote on Monday.

Nor would even the greatest egotists working with her in a Capitol overflowing with egomaniacs be able to keep as straight a face as she managed in her presser when she praised herself publicly as a ‘master legislator’ and an ‘astute leader.’

To which the dissidents reply: Anyone who has led them to four consecutive defeats, bringing their House caucus to its lowest point in the last 90 years, and whose name has become a cudgel with which to beat every House candidate put forward by the Democrats, ought to be astute enough to know when it is time to go.

“I think I’m worth the trouble,” Pelosi said at her weekly briefing with reporters on Thursday at the Capitol. “I am a master legislator.”

“I am a strategic politically astute leader,” Pelosi said. “My leadership is recognized by many around the country and that is why I am able to attract the support that I do, which is essential to our election, sad to say.”

Pelosi has led her party in the House since 2003, “overseeing losses in 2004, big gains in 2006 and 2008, then watching as her party slipped into its smallest minority in nearly a century,” the Washington Times reported.

Tobin also points out that the Democratic leadership does not represent the younger generation:

While Democrats like to say that they are the party of the young and that this portends their eventual return to power, they are led by a sclerotic band of elderly power brokers who bear a troubling resemblance to the party bosses of a bygone era of American political history. The Democrats’ House leadership team of Pelosi, her longtime antagonist Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn are, respectively, 77, 78, and 76.

When you consider that the Democrats’ two leading presidential contenders last year were the 69-year-old Hillary Clinton and the 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, it’s little wonder that Democrats are frustrated with their party’s inability to promote younger and fresher faces.

Democrats are led by a sclerotic band of elderly power brokers who bear a troubling resemblance to the party bosses of a bygone era of American political history. The trio of House Democratic septuagenarians is representative of the politics of the past, not just in terms of their stale liberal ideology but also in their tactics and belief in old-school methods.

Tobin concludes: “Pelosi’s boasts and threats are everything that is wrong with the Democrats, but as long as most of her members act like they don’t know it, they’re likely to remain a powerless and increasingly frustrated minority.”