Pelosi set to lead Democrats out of the desert

She didn’t run for Congress until she was 46, when her youngest daughter reached high school.

Twenty years later, Pelosi’s confident vision for House Democrats will be sorely tested in the messy business of making laws.

Her pledge to treat Republicans more fairly than they have dealt with Democrats could be “the first casualty of a Pelosi speakership,” said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California who has written extensively about Congress.

Rutgers political science professor Ross Baker said that as a leader of the Democratic minority, Pelosi executed “guerrilla warfare against a vastly superior force.” Her weaknesses, he said, included the Democrats’ failure to offer a clear message to counter the Republicans and her sometimes halting television presence. “She needs some work in the green room,” he said.

“My hunch is that there is some uneasiness in the House about her as speaker,” Baker said, adding that such reservations are tied partly to her liberal image.

Republicans worked overtime to stoke those reservations during a campaign that, in some GOP races, sometimes seemed to be solely about Pelosi. All around the country, GOP partisans invoked the specter of “Speaker Pelosi” as reason enough to keep the House in Republican hands.

Golden Gate in Indiana
In Indiana, for example, GOP mailings on behalf of Republican Rep. John Hostettler magically transported the Golden Gate Bridge from Pelosi’s district to an Indiana field, and declared, “San Francisco values don’t belong in Indiana.”

Pelosi, whose district takes in much of San Francisco, has a voting record that consistently gets her laurels from liberal interest groups and raspberries from conservatives.

But she also is a pragmatist.

“She’s good at counting noses, which means that she’ll do everything she can to represent the whole caucus,” said Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. “She’ll have to.”

California Rep. Dennis Cardoza, one the so-called Blue Dog Democrats who advocate fiscal restraint, said Pelosi recognizes that “in order for her to have a successful speakership, she will have to continue to embrace the moderates in the caucus.” He is quick to point out that Pelosi has promised to make an early push for reinstating “pay-as-you-go” budgeting rules that require new spending to be offset by raising taxes or cutting spending elsewhere.

But, as if to show the difficulty of Pelosi’s task, he also notes, “We’re not elected to be controlled; we’re elected to represent our districts.”

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