Nancy Pelosi: The Most Effective Speaker of the House in History
She's a helper, leave her the hell alone!
As Nancy Pelosi hands off the Speaker’s gavel to John Boehner today, she also hands him a tough act to follow. Despite insistent attempts to malign her during her four years as Speaker of the House, the California congresswoman turns out to have been arguably the most effective person in that post in U.S. history. And it’s not just rah-rah Democrats saying so.
“We’re looking at an extraordinary set of accomplishments over a brief period of time,” said Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “She ranks with the most consequential speakers, certainly in the last 75 years.”
Pelosi faced a House so divided along party lines that she couldn’t count on a single Republican vote for legislation–which means that she had to wrangle fellow Democrats to demonstrate a discipline and unity they have not been famous for. Out of that unity emerged a record of public policy triumphs unmatched since the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, according to University of Oklahoma political science professor Cindy Simon Rosenthal. “And much of it is because of her,” says Rosenthal.
A $787 billion stimulus.
The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. A minimum wage increase. Student aid. Extending health coverage to 11 million children.
The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
All of this legislation was very important to women and reflected Pelosi’s feminist values. “She is for women’s rights unequivocally,” says Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation (and publisher of Ms.). Pelosi herself told me in my interview with her in the new issue ofMs. magazine,
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http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/425315/nancy_pelosi:_the_most_effective_speaker_of_the_house_in_history/
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And I LOVE when patriarchal patronizing comes from a woman.
she was quite effective at making sure GWB didn't have to be accountable.
Thank you Nancy Pelosi~
Pelosi on Obama and the Road to Health Reform: Never a 'Down Moment'
She doesn't usually disclose what she and President Obama say to each other, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi made an exception a few hours after a sweeping health reform bill had become the law of the land. When it cleared the House on Sunday night, "he said that he was happier after the vote than he was the night that he won the presidency," she said, and laughed. "I said, 'Well I'm pretty happy, but I'm not happier than the night you won the presidency -- because if you hadn't won the presidency we wouldn't be here.' "
Pelosi recounted the conversation to a group of columnists she had invited to her office Tuesday to discuss an achievement that, in Obama's words, enshrines in law "the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care." Even as she spoke, the Republican Party was calling for "No More Madam Speaker" in an online ad that showed her surrounded by flames (a really terrible photo of her, too, I might add). But Madam Speaker, relaxed and euphoric in the afterglow of victory, described as "lower than a nano-something" the amount of interest she has in Republican "vilification" of her.
MOre.. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/24/pelosi-on-obama-and-the-road-to-health-reform-never-a-down-mom/
