Pelosi emerges as most powerful woman in US history

In modern American politics, “optics” are almost everything. How does a thing scan? What is the visceral, headline news, the gut-level response?

On that level, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a disaster.

Politics aside, even many of my liberal friends find her style — her body language, her way of speaking and even her laugh — off-putting.

Part of this is a hangover from America’s more patriarchal, rural roots. Not so long ago, men were the politicians and women were the “first wives” of society.

Even many influential women in Washington made their way into the halls of power with a kind of deprecating, soft-touch style.

Our fondness for tough-guy leaders and folksy, comforting women has been challenged occasionally by women like Hillary Clinton.

But the election of pickup truck driving Scott Brown in Massachusetts shows that traditional git’r’done imagery still counts for a lot.

Nancy Pelosi plays against all of those cultural instincts. She is unambiguously urban, an unapologetic pro-choice feminist.

She doesn’t hide from the fact that she’s a mom and a grandmom — but it’s not the core of her political identity.

And yet somehow, while pundits were repeatedly penning her epitaph, she emerged as the most powerful woman in US history.

As the first woman to serve as House Speaker, she shepherded through controversial health care legislation that stymied party bosses and Presidents since the Gilded Age.

Several reports published in recent days indicate that it was Pelosi, and not Barack Obama, who stayed the course, insisting that the health care fight was worth the costs.

Will it prove a political miscalculation? Perhaps.

Republicans will certainly work to link individual House members to Pelosi and Sunday’s vote, in much the way that Democrats linked their GOP opponents to Newt Gingrich.

It may be that Pelosi’s ambition will even cost her party its majority in November.

But her willingness to take that risk has already secured her a place in the history books.

Writing in USA Today, Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, argued that Republicans are wrong to caricature Pelosi as “a left coast, left-wing fanatic.”

“She is something much more powerful and threatening to their party,” Zelizer argued. “Pelosi emerges from this battle as the real powerhouse in Washington.”