House of Eratosthenes

Asked this weekend to grade her performance as speaker, Nancy Pelosi gave herself an “A for effort.”

But Pelosi knows that the real test is still to come.

Pelosi is inarguably one of the strongest speakers in modern history — an authoritarian figure in an era of centralized power in the House. But the coming months are a make-or-break period for her, a brutal reality check of her ability to manage all aspects of her job — consensus-building, agenda-setting, vote-counting, fundraising and campaigning.

Now in her fourth year as speaker and eighth overall as the top Democrat in the House, Pelosi has never faced such a daunting set of challenges:

Health care: Pelosi and other top House Democrats say publicly that they have the votes to push through a comprehensive package, but privately, they know they don’t. Pelosi must balance the diverging interests of her own members while simultaneously satisfying Senate Democrats and working with President Barack Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a former House colleague with whom she has an uneasy relationship.

The voters: The electoral winds that were at Pelosi’s back in the past two cycles thanks to having George W. Bush in the White House are blowing this year in Democrats’ faces. Prognosticators both inside and outside the party are laying odds on an outcome that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago: a GOP takeover of the House.

Democratic infighting: The factions that make up the House Democratic majority, from the conservative Blue Dog Coalition to the liberal Progressive Caucus, are increasingly willing to fight for their own priorities at the risk of party unity. That dynamic was evident last week when a simple $15 billion jobs bill was punted from the floor schedule over a series of Goldilocks-like objections about too little spending, too much spending and misdirected spending.

Strong. Authoritiarian. You’ll notice, in that third paragraph in which the story tries to offer balance between both sides and shower its meaningless platitudes, a certain adjective was missing in action: Influential.

Influential, as in: Things were going to go this way, but Nancy Pelosi did X and because of that things went this other way. She made a huge difference.

It is the one quality democrats admire most. And yet, currently, all the folks they consider to be wonderful leaders and huge big household names, have been offered opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate they have this.

So far, in that one half-term “Quitter” Palin pulled up in our union’s largest state, she beats ’em all. Seriously. Go on, fill in the sentence: “This was going to happen, but Obama did X and that other thing happened instead.” And then repeat the exercise after substituting Pelosi’s name. Then Hillary Clinton’s. Joe Biden’s. Fill in something.

Out of the whole sorry lot of ’em, living and dead, all I can think of is “Mary Jo Kopechne was going to die an old woman, warm and safe in her bed, but Ted Kennedy…”

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Reality Check For Speaker NanTuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Reality Check For Speaker Nan
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010