In modern American politics, “optics” are almost everything. How does a thing scan? What is the visceral, headline news, the gut-level response?<\/p>\n
On that level, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a disaster. <\/p>\n
Politics aside, even many of my liberal friends find her style — her body language, her way of speaking and even her laugh — off-putting.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Even many influential women in Washington made their way into the halls of power with a kind of deprecating, soft-touch style.<\/p>\n
Our fondness for tough-guy leaders and folksy, comforting women has been challenged occasionally by women like Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n
But the election of pickup truck driving Scott Brown in Massachusetts shows that traditional git’r’done imagery still counts for a lot.<\/p>\n
Nancy Pelosi plays against all of those cultural instincts. She is unambiguously urban, an unapologetic pro-choice feminist.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And yet somehow, while pundits were repeatedly penning her epitaph, she emerged as the most powerful woman in US history.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Will it prove a political miscalculation? Perhaps. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It may be that Pelosi’s ambition will even cost her party its majority in November.<\/p>\n
But her willingness to take that risk has already secured her a place in the history books. <\/p>\n
Writing in USA Today, Princeton historian Julian Zelizer, argued that Republicans are wrong to caricature Pelosi as “a left coast, left-wing fanatic.”<\/p>\n
“She is something much more powerful and threatening to their party,” Zelizer argued. “Pelosi emerges from this battle as the real powerhouse in Washington.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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