Nancy Pelosi: The Blue Team’s MVP

The election of Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats' Minority Leader is bad news for the GOP. In fact, there's a good chance that in 2013 she'll be Speaker again.

Why are so many conservatives celebrating the election of Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats’ Minority Leader? Her election is actually bad news for conservatives. In short, there’s a good chance that in 2013 she will become Speaker again and will be very instrumental in pushing through the second half of Obama’s transformational agenda.

Pelosi has never actually been either ineffective or too liberal. When she was first elected Minority Leader in 2003, it looked like the era of Republican domination would last forever. Yet, in 2006, she led the Democrats to a majority in the House and became Speaker. And no, it was not preordained (by Iraq or Katrina or other factors); she had to work hard for that victory. Very importantly, she did not behave like Senator DeMint. She did not insist on ideological purity. She welcomed moderate Democrats into her caucus. She never said she would rather have 130 principled liberals in the House than 260 unprincipled Democrats.

Once she had power, she did not talk about giving President Bush his Waterloo. She did not block war funding. She steadfastly opposed any talk of impeachment. She was never particularly eager to investigate what the president knew about Iraqi WMDs and when he knew it. In fact, for all her troubles she even got a primary challenger from the left (Cindy Sheehan). But somehow conservatives constantly use the stereotype of “San Francisco Democrat” and never mention that of “South Carolina Republican”.

In 2008, Pelosi significantly expanded her majority and then got to work enacting Obama’s agenda. She passed cap-and-trade (it’s not her fault that it stalled in the Senate). She passed the House version of Obamacare. But her finest hour came after the election of Scott Brown. Everybody thought healthcare reform was dead. But Pelosi managed to make it happen – and that involved, among other things, getting the House to approve the stinking Senate version (with the Cornhusker Kickback and all). In other words, she went above and beyond the call of duty in order to enact one of the top Democratic priorities for decades.

Pelosi must have been fully cognizant of the additional risks to her majority in the coming midterm election.  However, she clearly decided that was an acceptable risk, and by all measures most Democrats seem to agree it was worth it. Her House losses were bad, but smaller than a lot of observers anticipated. And the Democrats only need to win back roughly a third of their lost seats in order to become the majority party in the House once again. That is eminently doable. Of course, a lot will depend on the economy and other factors, but assuming the economy sufficiently improves by 2012, Obama will probably easily win reelection while bringing (once again) a lot of additional black and young voters to the polls and helping Democratic candidates down the ballot.

The 60-plus Republican freshmen will not yet be entrenched and will face a tough fight. To make it worse, many of them are needlessly weak politicians courtesy of the Tea Party which used closed primaries to knock out some stronger general election candidates. A disastrous GOP presidential candidate (unfortunately, a distinct possibility at this moment) may further damage the chances of congressional Republicans, and, of course, they can damage their chances themselves by not being careful about what they do with their new majority and by coming across as obstructionists or simply dysfunctional (unfortunately, so far it does not look like they have a good plan – or any plan for that matter).

So Pelosi may well become Speaker again in 2013 – and use her majority again to implement Obama’s vision for transforming the country. We know she’ll be effective at that task.