President Obama has worked alongside Nancy Pelosi for five years, but his appreciation for her has gone from polite blandishments to something akin to rediscovery.
While raising money for House Democrats in Boston Wednesday night, the president said the minority leader from California “has just constantly surprised me by just how good, how tough, how visionary and how committed she is, and dedicated to the well-being of not just her own constituents but the American people.”
Less publicly he’s described Pelosi as “tough as nails,” confiding his respect for her ability to corral votes in her conference, even when some of her Democratic members initially feel less than united.
Whether Obama is correct that Pelosi occasionally subsumes her personal druthers or those of her San Francisco constituents in order to extricate the president, their party, John Boehner, or the country from jams is beside the point. Obama’s recent gushing that the 14-term congresswoman is a valued weapon against Washington’s dysfunction is a message welcomed by Democrats who viewed a government shutdown and the country’s near-default as a consequence of erratic House Republicans.
For years the president has been telling Democratic donors that Pelosi “perhaps” could be returned as speaker — a position she lost to Boehner after the Democrats’ 2010 midterm wipe-out. It’s a posture that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney deadpanned with sarcasm Thursday is “a shocking position to hold.” In other words, would Obama really suggest anything else to his party?
But the president is nearly at the end of a year devoid of major legislative breakthroughs, and he blames Republicans in the House. Pelosi, he suggests, is more helpful than Democrats comprehend while they remain in the minority in the lower chamber. But if they win back the majority next year, the president thinks his second term could gain some altitude.
“The interests of the American people will be better served if I’ve got Nancy Pelosi standing by my side and we get the agenda done,” the president said Thursday night.
When Democrats controlled the House during Obama’s first two years in office, Pelosi and her lieutenants helped enact a stimulus bill, controversial bank bailouts and the Affordable Care Act. The House also passed climate change legislation. But as a consequence, she lost her gavel to Boehner when Republicans gained 63 seats in the 2010 midterm elections.
Pelosi last week said Obamacare was not the Democrats’ undoing at the polls. She said the GOP was able to capitalize on the unpopularity of the Troubled Asset Relief Program that used taxpayer funds to buoy some of the nation’s largest financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
“One of the most damaging votes that our members had to take was the TARP, 700-plus billion dollars to bail out Wall Street in the view of the public,” she said during a news conference last week on Capitol Hill. “We didn’t see it that way. We saw it as rescuing our economy from a financial services meltdown.”
“People never even got over that vote,” she added. “It really in some ways gave birth to the Tea Party. … That was really the vote that sort of soured people. … And they judged many other things in light of” that action.
This month, Pelosi led her members to deliver the necessary votes to end a 17-day government shutdown and avert a debt ceiling crisis after the speaker failed to muster consensus inside his divided GOP caucus. All 198 Democrats who voted gave their assent, while 144 Republicans voted no.
Those are among the House votes Obama has in mind when he praises Pelosi’s command of her troops.
Whether she’ll be speaker in 2015 is a separate question. It presumes an unlikely sweep for Democrats — and the conference’s decision to crown her rather than any of the younger members who might represent the next generation of party leadership.
Nonpartisan House analysts describe the chances of Democrats taking back the House as iffy, but not impossible, a year from now. According to an Oct. 31 analysis by the Cook Political Report, Democrats would need to win all solidly Democratic districts (165); all the “likely” Democratic districts (counted as 12); all the districts that lean Democratic (15); all of the tossup races (12); plus 14 of the 16 races in districts labeled “lean GOP.” Democrats — now numbering 201 to the GOP’s 234 — need a net gain of 17 seats to secure a House majority of 218 votes.
Charlie Cook, in an Oct. 22 column in National Journal, wrote that House control may turn on whether Republicans lose their footing, more than on Obama’s or Pelosi’s efforts to propel Democrats to victory. “One of the top Democrats in the House told us privately months ago, ‘Democrats can’t take the House but Republicans can lose it.’ Well said,” Cook wrote.
Nonetheless, Obama has in mind a brisk schedule through the end of the year to raise money to help House Democrats in those races, and next year he’ll campaign for candidates in many of the districts he captured in 2012.
An unlikely comeback in the House could transform the flagging Obama presidency, in which Washington gridlock has taken a toll.
“Our former speaker and, hopefully, soon-to-be speaker once again, Nancy Pelosi,” the president said when he introduced his smiling “partner” in Boston.
In Pelosi, Obama Sees Vital Ally for Securing Legacy
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