Pelosi’s role diminishes under Obama

After decades scaling the Democratic Party ranks, Nancy Pelosi reached a pinnacle in January 2007, becoming the first woman speaker of the House.

For two years, alongside Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, she fashioned the party’s agenda on Capitol Hill, fought a rear-guard action against the Bush administration and, more broadly, helped define what it means to be a Democrat.

Now, however, it’s gotten crowded at the top.

Under President Obama, a breakthrough figure in his own right, the party has a new face, an ambitious platform and a commanding voice -- and Pelosi is discovering what it means to be back in a lesser role, with someone else setting the party’s agenda and establishing its priorities.

The San Francisco Democrat says she is comfortable with her new position, after years of battling President George W. Bush.

“It’s what we’ve hoped for, worked for, prayed for,” Pelosi said of the Obama administration. “The difference between being the speaker without a president of your party and the speaker with Barack Obama as president is night and day.”

But, inevitably, tensions have emerged.

Pelosi wants Bush’s tax cuts for wealthy Americans to expire sooner than Obama has proposed. She is more receptive than Obama to a congressional investigation of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program and criminal prosecution of any officials who used torture as a weapon to fight terrorism.

She was a strong backer of a punitive tax on bonuses paid to AIG employees, a move that has drawn a cool response from Obama.

Pelosi questioned whether Obama’s proposal for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq went far enough and made her feelings known in a frank discussion before the president revealed his plans, as well as in public statements after his announcement.

Although Obama has pledged a new spirit of bipartisanship in Washington and tried to win GOP support, Republicans complained that Pelosi had shut them out of negotiations on the economic stimulus bill. Privately, she counseled Obama and his advisors that courting House Republicans was a waste of time (and surely felt vindicated when not a single one voted to support the far-reaching legislation.)

“Yes, we wrote this bill,” she told reporters amid the GOP griping. “We won this election.”

That sort of blunt talk may reflect the reality in the House, where Pelosi has the power -- and the inclination, when she sees fit -- to run roughshod over the minority.

But it won’t necessarily help the president pass his proposals into law.

“Obama has shown an instinct for finding the middle, both to avoid being pulled too far to the left and to win enough Republican votes to pass anything in the Senate,” said Don Kettl, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist and longtime Congress watcher.

“But that might not sit well with Pelosi’s instincts and preferences. So we might well be looking at an ongoing tug of war. . . . If either of them allows the tension to bubble to the surface, it could well explode into a volcano that would disrupt the Democrats’ agenda.”

Beyond their policy differences and disparate styles -- the contrast between the hard-charging Pelosi and low-key Obama could hardly be greater -- there are larger forces that almost guarantee a certain amount of friction between the speaker and the president.

Obama won his mandate directly from the American people. Pelosi, by contrast, owes her position to the 254 Democratic members of the House.

As such, the speaker is determined to protect congressional prerogatives and prevent Democrats from taking politically risky votes that could endanger their seats and weaken the party majority -- even if that means undermining Obama and sometimes thwarting his goals.

“This isn’t going to be a Congress that’s BTU’d,” said a longtime friend and occasional Pelosi advisor, referring to a politically damaging vote by House Democrats who passed an energy consumption tax under President Clinton, only to have the administration abandon the proposal after Senate opposition.

“She’ll be very pragmatic about making sure the moderate and conservative members of her caucus can get reelected,” said Pelosi’s friend, a Californian who did not want to be identified discussing their relationship.

At the same time, Pelosi has to reckon with a number of powerful committee chairmen on Capitol Hill, including two friends, California’s George Miller (D-Martinez) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), who seem intent on shaping major legislation to their liking, regardless of what Obama or more conservative lawmakers might prefer.

That could leave Pelosi caught between the president, her longtime liberal allies and Democrats more to the right, though Miller, for one, said trying to balance those interests was not such a bad problem.

“You have a president of the United States of the same party,” Miller said. “That’s flat out exciting, and the benefits overwhelm every other consideration.”

That may be especially true for Pelosi, 68, who has been a Democrat since birth -- her father was a New Deal congressman and Baltimore mayor -- and served as California party chairwoman, a national fundraiser and House minority whip (the party’s chief vote wrangler) among less exalted positions. She has represented San Francisco, her adopted hometown, in Washington for nearly 22 years.

Being speaker has its perks: a $223,500 salary (not that the wealthy Pelosi needs the paycheck to make ends meet), a car and driver, and a drop-dead view from her Capitol office. But perhaps the greatest benefit after all those years in the minority and serving under Republican presidents is the chance to pursue the goals she and Obama share, including expanded healthcare, a green energy policy and a more middle-class-friendly tax structure.

“On the big picture, the vision, the strategy . . . there is no distance between us,” said Pelosi, who is happy to draw Republican fire if it means the president can float above the fray. “I’m in the arena. That’s fine with me.”

Those who have watched the two interact say Pelosi is genuinely fond of Obama; the president, they say, likes and respects the speaker. The two talk almost daily, often face to face, when one pulls the other aside after a group meeting.

“To accomplish what’s been accomplished in a very short amount of time requires a lot of coordination and a very good working relationship,” said a senior White House official, citing passage of Obama’s economic rescue package and bills expanding children’s health insurance and targeting pay discrimination.

“The speaker’s done everything the president asked for her to do in moving the things he felt strongly about,” said the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly for the administration.

Obama has called Pelosi “our rock,” a word he used both privately and in the nationally broadcast speech he delivered to House Democrats in February.

There is a strong incentive for Pelosi and Obama (and Reid) to make their relationship work: memories of 1993 and 1994, the last time Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House.

There were tensions from the start -- the BTU tax was not the only time Democrats felt politically undermined by their own president -- and the experience ended badly for the party when Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

“Ultimately [Pelosi] wants Obama to succeed,” said Martin Frost, a former Democratic House leader, who once opposed her elevation to speaker but has since become a fan. “It’s not in her interest, or House Democrats’ interest, that Obama fail.”

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richard.simon@latimes.com

mark.barabak@latimes.com

Times staff writer Faye Fiore contributed to this report.