You already know the negatives: In the latest Bloomberg News poll, just 31 percent of the public rated her favorably, while 48 percent gave her unfavorable marks. She is neither eloquent on the public platform nor relaxed on television, where she smiles too often.
But what she has done cannot be ignored. In the last four months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has not once, not twice but on three separate occasions done what none of her predecessors — including legendary giants Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, D-Mass., and Sam Rayburn, D-Texas — could ever do: persuade the House of Representatives to pass national health-care reform. Pelosi has proved herself to be the most powerful woman in U.S. political history.
More relaxed away from the cameras and obviously happy just hours after President Barack Obama had signed the health-are bill into law, the San Francisco Democrat invited a group of columnists to her office. There, she told of her conversation with Obama right after the House, late Sunday, had passed the bill.
“He said he was happier after the (House) vote than he was the night that he won the presidency,” Pelosi said. “And I said, ‘Well, I’m happy, but I’m not happier than the night you won the presidency — because if you hadn’t won the presidency, we wouldn’t be here.”
Obama and the Senate Democrats were, of course, indispensable to the victory. But the House was the critical battleground. If the House rejected the Senate-passed health bill, then the Obama administration’s year-long campaign to change the nation’s health-care system would go down in flames, taking with it Democratic hopes.
In Washington, power is the perception of power. If enough people think you have power, then you do have power. The Obama White House was facing a severe power shortage. In the crunch, Pelosi proved to be a one-woman power plant.
After Republican Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate race and some in the White House (but never Obama, who according to multiple sources, never wavered) wanted to shrink the health-care plan down to passable bite size, Pelosi refused. She stared down the doubters within her party and insisted they could and would enact the Big Reform.
Through literally hundreds of meetings with colleagues, in one-on-one sessions and in dozens of party caucuses on the subject, Pelosi listened to concerns and sought to calm doubts. She concentrated her attention on the approximately 30 House Democrats whose votes would determine success or failure. From knowledge and understanding, she knew who were the most effective individuals to make the strongest case to each of them.
In the final analysis, of course, the fight over health care was destined to come down to abortion. Pelosi, a practicing Catholic and graduate of Trinity, a Catholic college in Washington, is unequivocally pro-choice, but as she candidly reminded pro-choice Democratic women: “This is not an abortion-rights bill. It is a health-care bill.”
Dick Gephardt, Pelosi’s predecessor as House Democratic leader, believes that only Pelosi, a pro-choice woman, could be an honest broker and convince pro-choice Democratic women to live with Obama’s compromise executive order guaranteeing anti-abortion Democrats that the reform law would not liberalize federal abortion law.
As a result of their success in passing health care, Democrats have a new spring in their step and a smile on their faces. They know that whatever else happens, nobody can ever accuse them of being part of a Do-Nothing Congress. They realize they have done the historic — that, because of what they did, Obama now truly becomes a transformational president.
Democrats know, too, they did it together with their speaker and by themselves.
— Mark Shields is one of the most widely recognized political commentators in the United States. The former Washington Post editorial columnist appears regularly on CNN, on public television and on radio. Click here to contact him.