Nancy Pelosi, most powerful woman in US (and since nobody mentions that she's a total fox, I will)

Nancy Pelosi Is Ready to Be Voice of the Majority – by KATE ZERNIKE/NY Times

WASHINGTON -- As Representative Nancy Pelosi faced the cameras Wednesday morning, after the Democrats had taken a majority in the House and put her on the brink of becoming the first female speaker, she spoke so softly at first that some reporters insisted they could not hear her.

“I’m not in charge of the technical arrangements,” Ms. Pelosi said quietly, fiddling with the microphone.

Then suddenly, she was commanding: “But I could use my mother-of-five voice!”

It is a line Ms. Pelosi uses often, and a voice she may have to rely on frequently as she tries to ensure that the new Democratic majority lasts more than two years.

As speaker, she would be second in line to the presidency — the closest a woman in elective office has come to the White House. And while she has been a leader in Congress for years, and the target of Republican attacks, many Americans still do not know who she is. Her new job places her on a more visible stage, with much greater stakes.

Ms. Pelosi, 66, who has been a San Francisco congresswoman for 20 years, became minority leader and then guided her caucus to victory by enforcing remarkable party discipline. She curbed the demands of those who share her often-caricatured liberal values, while making a place for the party’s conservatives, for whom San Francisco is sometimes as distant as the moon.

She finds herself now with a more diverse caucus than before, some of its liberal members elected on a pledge to pull out of Iraq immediately, some members so conservative they often sounded like Republicans during their campaigns. She also has to work with Republican House members and a president she blasted — and took a blasting from — during a bitter two-year campaign.

Her friends say her background — as the daughter of a Baltimore mayor and congressman, the youngest and only girl in a family of six children, and the mother of five — has prepared her perfectly.

“I’ll say to her, ‘Nancy, I’d blow up if I had to deal what you deal with,’ and she says, ‘I had five children in six years,’ ” said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, an old friend of Ms. Pelosi. “If there wasn’t discipline in her house, there would have been chaos. She knows how important that is.”

Ms. Pelosi’s colleagues and friends describe her as a person of singular focus. That was evident as the House worked its final night before breaking to campaign for the midterm elections, significantly distracted by the resignation of Representative Mark Foley , Republican of Florida, after he was revealed to have sent sexually explicit electronic messages to Congressional pages.

Toward midnight, Ms. Pelosi took the floor. “As a mother and grandmother and the leader of the House Democrats,” she began, demanding an investigation into what House leaders knew about the Foley messages. Republicans booed, a rarity even in the raucous House chamber. She pressed on, however, smiling her unbudging smile.

“Mr. Speaker, once again, as a mother and a grandmother,” she continued, demanding that the votes be recorded.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said, one of the things that motivated her to run for leadership “was that people didn’t want to win.”

“They were all going through the motions, but they weren’t kicking it into gear.” he said. “She looked around and said, ‘What is this? I didn’t come here to hang out.’ ”

After the Democrats lost in 2004, Ms. Pelosi talked to consultants about how the party could win, rather than resigning itself to minority status. Their suggestion, her advisers said, was to “take down” the president; it was not enough to simply kick him in the shins. Then, the consultants advised, she had to differentiate between the two parties, and finally, articulate the positive things that the Democrats would do.

She fought the president first on Social Security, sending Democratic lawmakers to tell the elderly in town-hall-style meetings that the president’s plan for change would reward Wall Street at their expense.

While she had long opposed the war, she also realized that a liberal congresswoman from California would have little impact in speaking out against it. And she pushed back against liberal members of her party who wanted to protest by denying financing for the war. Instead, she worked quietly with Representative John P. Murtha , a conservative Democrat from Pennsylvania and a veteran who had supported the war, to get him to express his growing doubts about it.

Representative Edward J. Markey , Democrat of Massachusetts, said: “The most credible person in the Democratic Party would be the face of the party on this issue. She knew that because he had supported it, he had the greatest credibility to critique it.”

Mr. Markey called Ms. Pelosi a liberal pragmatist: “San Francisco on the inside, Baltimore on the outside.”

When Ms. Pelosi and Senate Democratic leaders were drafting their “Six for ‘06” platform going into the campaign, she pushed back on including traditionally liberal ideas like universal health care.

“She realizes that you cannot make everyone happy,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

Ms. Pelosi has used a style that one Democratic aide characterized as “chocolate and the gavel” to bring party members along. As she rose through the ranks, she would often deliver chocolate cakes to supporters or helpful staff members, and now her meetings are characterized by bowls of Ghirardelli chocolate. Representative Gene Taylor, a conservative Democrat from Mississippi, was heartened when Ms. Pelosi called to encourage his efforts after Republicans had refused to extend health benefits to reservists in a military appropriations bill. Mr. Taylor had voted against her in the leadership elections, but the gesture was the start of a positive relationship.

“She puts a very big premium on people who have ideas, but not if you think your idea is to the exclusion of everyone else’s input,” Mr. Taylor said.

Where the history is not so clear is whether Ms. Pelosi can find common ground with Republicans, if they let her. Her advisers say she wants to work in a bipartisan manner, but that does not mean agreeing to everything.

The biggest question is how Ms. Pelosi will define her relationship with President Bush. Her staff says the two already have some rapport because of the documentary film that her youngest child, Alexandra, made about the president’s 2000 campaign. But that is different from a working political relationship.

She will have her first chance on Thursday, when she has lunch with Mr. Bush.

In a rare unscripted moment Wednesday, Ms. Pelosi noted that Mr. Bush had telephoned her that morning. “He called to congratulate me, referred to me as Madam Speaker-elect,” she said, smiling. She paused, then — still smiling — added, “I referred to him as Mr. President.”