Happy (70th) Birthday, Speaker Pelosi!

Nancy Pelosi -- it's her House

Pelosi's role in passing healthcare reform puts her in the top rank of House speakers.
By Harold Meyerson

March 26, 2010

Anyone who has heard Nancy Pelosi speak knows she is not a great speaker. Her favorite rhetorical device is to seize on a word and club her listeners over the head with it.

When she spoke from the floor of the House on Sunday in support of the healthcare reform bill, the word she wielded was "opportunity." Her point -- that the bill would enable Americans to leave their jobs to start up new ventures without fear of not being able to get health insurance in their new gig -- was altogether valid and perfectly good, but she insisted on repeating the word "opportunity" so many times that she left listeners (this listener, anyway) a little woozy.

But when it comes to being a speaker -- the presiding officer of the House of Representatives and the leader of its majority party -- Pelosi is without peer. No speaker in the past century has played such a key role in enacting major reforms. No speaker since Henry Clay, who wielded the gavel in the 1810s and '20s, has had so great an effect on American life.

During the 20th century, there were distinguished and accomplished speakers, of course, most notably Sam Rayburn and Tip O'Neill. But neither was speaker during the great reforms of the 1930s and the 1960s, and the men who were speakers during those years -- Henry Rainey and Joseph Byrns during the New Deal, John McCormack during the Great Society -- played no major role in the epochal reforms of those eras.

Newt Gingrich did play a key role in rolling back welfare laws, but his speakership was plagued by his ethics problems and his rhetorical excesses, and he left Congress, to his fellow Republicans' relief, after their setbacks in the 1998 elections.

Since Pelosi's speakership coincides with a period of ideological and partisan polarization in Congress (chiefly the result of the extinction of liberal and moderate Republicanism), her triumphs are necessarily those of a party leader. In 2006 and 2008, she led House Democrats to sweeping electoral victories, in good measure the result of her fundraising, targeting and candidate recruitment prowess.

In the battle this year for healthcare reform, she had no cushion of Republican votes she could count on to ease the pressure on House Democrats. All of the votes had to come from her own, nervous ranks. And she delivered them.

<SNIP>

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson26-2010mar26,0,2244616,print.story

Happy Birthday Speaker!

If you really want to make her day and help keep her as Speaker of the House...

http://www.dccc.org/blitz

And keep riding herd on those cats.

clip last night.

That's one beautiful woman!

Happy Birthday Nancy :party:

I think many people underestimated her. She is one tough woman. And one of the best vote-getters I have ever seen in Congress.

Best wishes for many more, and congratulations and a big thank you for your role in achieving historic healthcare reform.

We support you! Many of us appreciate your hard conscientious work addressing difficult issues.

Thank-you!:toast: :party: :kick: :patriot:

and thank you!

Enjoy that pool table.

:party: site where they were taking up money to send her roses! Sweet:party:

:party: :party:

Sometimes when you need something done you gotta send a woman to do it!

Signed: A woman from her generation who is Very Proud of her.

... (Matalin and Carville look like twin snakes by now) or the Doles.

Looks good on her!

Hekate

... into all that she or any politician does. (I mean really, "traitor"?!)

To me she's always been one of Washington DC's "California Girls" and I just know she's working like hell for us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU5IODKNbNs

Happy Birthday, Nancy! :yourock:

Hekate

i'm sure she gets some work done. but many people do including those younger than her and they don't look as good as her.

she probably has always taken good care of herself. she is in great physical shape.