Nancy Pelosi has gotten better. She calls Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “a master virtuoso legislator,” but as Reid’s counterpart in the House she’s just being polite. It’s clear now that she’s the star of the Democratic congressional leadership. Reid is a klutz and she isn’t. Pelosi has gotten comfortable as House speaker, so much so that she’s talking about having daily press conferences. In any event, she’s devoting more time to public appearances now. Pelosi says she has “more breathing room” after concentrating for months on legislation. She had no trouble Tuesday handling the questions of 40 reporters and commentators at a lunch hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. And that included her answer to a question about whether the professional football San Francisco 49ers should move southward to the Silicon Valley or San Jose. After 9 months of running the House, Pelosi’s become considerably more realistic about what Democrats can achieve. “Passing legislation is very difficult,” she says. Her particular frustration is the inability to halt the war in Iraq. “We have not done well in ending this war,” Pelosi concedes. When the bill authored by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, requiring troops to stay 15 months outside Iraq before returning for a new tour, failed in the Senate in September, Pelosi says she got “the message.” Democrats’ hopes that the Senate would act had been “hopes in a place that was not going to come through.”Now, Pelosi says, there is “not much common ground” on the war between Democrats and Republicans. President Bush is committed to a war “so long term with a high level of troops … clearly he doesn’t want to end the war.” Republicans “guard the gate” to the White House, protecting Bush’s authority as commander in chief to direct the war. Still, she says, “We owed it to the American people” to try to override Bush and stop the war. They couldn’t pull it off, she says, but Democrats never said they could. “We don’t have the veto pen, the signature pen.” As you might expect, Pelosi misses no opportunity to tout the bill, vetoed by Bush, that would expand S-chip, the government-run health insurance program for poor and some not-so-poor kids. She loves to make comparisons involving S-chip. Servicing the national debt for one year costs the same as S-chip over 5 years. The money to fund the war in Iraq for 40 days would pay for 10 million children under S-chip. And so on. Pelosi took questions for an hour without breaking a sweat. She was never at a loss for facts. Unlike Reid, she didn’t say anything dumb. I came away with a more favorable impression of her political skills than I’d had. If she’s merely a front woman for other House Democrats like George Miller of California, she didn’t strike me that way. Quite the contrary. One last thing: the 49ers. “We want them right in San Francisco,” she says. “I know what it is to be a major league city.” Her father, as mayor of Baltimore, brought the football Colts to the city in the early 1950s and, two years later, lured the baseball Orioles. Those are bad family credentials. Pelosi says it’s up to city officials to keep the 49ers in town. “What can I do?” Probably plenty. The 49ers would be well advised not to mess with her.
