Quotes of the Day

There's only one thing dumber in politics than picking a fight when you don't have to; it's picking one when you can't win. That's why pretty much everyone in Washington is mystified by Nancy Pelosi. Through a midterm-election campaign in which Republicans had tried to caricature her as a fuzzy-headed and dangerous San Francisco liberal, she succeeded in keeping the focus on them. And the first woman Speaker-to-be was pitch-perfect in the euphoric days that followed the Democrats' big win. She said the right things, and she did the right things, like quietly reshuffling her ranks to avoid a showdown between Rahm Emanuel, the campaign-committee chief who delivered her majority, and James Clyburn, a senior member of the black caucus. Even the arrival of her sixth grandchild seemed auspiciously timed to remind everyone of her motherly side. Yet before many Democrats across the country had even taken down their yard signs, Pelosi decided to step on her own coronation by turning what would otherwise have been an all-but-ignored secret ballot for majority leader into a gang war. Instead of quietly accepting that her rival Steny Hoyer would continue to be her second in command, she threw herself into a fierce and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for John Murtha, an old friend whose ethics didn't seem to match Pelosi's talk of a new day in Congress.

All that raised a lot of new questions about Pelosi herself—about her judgment, her political instincts and her real ideology. Was her endorsement of longtime ally John Murtha over Hoyer a testament to her loyalty or proof that she is incapable of letting go of old grudges? Was putting her muscle behind the hero of the party's antiwar wing a sign that she would steer her fractious and fragile coalition over the guardrails on the left? Did her support for a man who is notorious for slipping special-interest earmarks into spending bills prove that she didn't really mean all that talk about cleaning up Congress? In other words, was Nancy Pelosi really up to the job?

THE FALLOUT

Pelosi will have to answer those questions with her actions in the months ahead. "It was a serious misstep and inexplicable to me," former Republican leader Dick Armey chortled. "I just hope she does more of it." But the Murtha defeat will be largely forgotten if the Democrats under Pelosi's leadership rack up a series of victories on the agenda that she had laid out for her first 100 hours as Speaker, which includes raising the minimum wage, forcing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription-drug prices, cutting student-loan rates and making the national-security fixes recommended by the 9/11 commission. Then there is the biggest issue of all, now that the Democrats are partners in governing and not just critics: charting a course on Iraq. Hoyer insists the phased withdrawal he supports is not all that different from the exit strategy that Murtha and Pelosi are pushing, but his victory tells Pelosi her caucus members will not tolerate her getting too far ahead of them.

Pelosi may now have to reconsider how she plans to deal with another rival, fellow California Congresswoman Jane Harman. Pelosi has already made it clear that she does not want to give Harman the top job on the Intelligence Committee when the party formally takes over in January. Harman, whose qualifications no one doubts, says she was promised it by earlier Democratic leaders; Pelosi says her term is up. But by shutting out Harman, Pelosi would be setting another trap for herself. The next in line after Harman is Florida's Alcee Hastings, who in 1989 was impeached and removed from his federal judgeship by Congress over allegations that he had conspired to take a $150,000 bribe (charges of which he was acquitted in court). If Pelosi passes him over, she is certain to infuriate the Congressional Black Caucus, with whom her relations are already strained.

The new Speaker will also be under more pressure to push through lobbying and ethics reform but may find that harder to accomplish. After an election in which exit polls showed that voters are more concerned about corruption than the Iraq war, Pelosi needs to recover the high ground she lost with her endorsement of Murtha, who said he thought her reform measures were "total crap." It was bad enough that Murtha's candidacy turned the cable-news networks into a film festival of the grainy tapes from the Abscam sting in 1980, in which the Pennsylvania Congressman told an agent posing as an Arab sheik that he couldn't be bribed "at this point." But on ethics reforms or any other tough issues that lawmakers like to publicly support and privately fight, Pelosi might now lack the backroom clout needed to get results. "When key votes like the budget come around, this will make it a lot harder for her to pressure members," said a Democratic Congressman who backed Hoyer over Murtha. "It's going to be a lot harder for that pressure to be as meaningful."

THE FIGHT CLUB

Speaker of the House is one of the most treacherous jobs in Washington. Tip O'Neill was the last one to leave the big chair voluntarily, nearly 20 years ago. The four who have followed him have been ousted. Pelosi may have taken a different path to power than her predecessors—she was 47 and had raised five children before she ran for office the first time—but by rising rapidly in an institution where getting ahead has always meant waiting in line for your turn, she ensured that she would have a large target on her back. Now the qualities and impulses that fueled her rise—making bold moves, keeping and settling scores, trusting only a small circle of loyalists—could be disastrous in a new role that is all about building alliances that can get you to 218 votes.

To adapt, she will have to understand that today's opponent could be tomorrow's ally. Few in Congress have such a memory for slights and betrayals. She still bristles at the fact that when she first went to Washington, many in the Democratic establishment didn't take her seriously and opposed her march up the leadership. As she told Time earlier this year, "They couldn't control me, so they tried to take me down." When her former House colleague Martin Frost was running to head the Democratic National Committee after the 2004 elections, she lobbied against him with a determination that all sides attributed to Frost's challenging her for Democratic leader two years before. Asked about those conflicts, Pelosi refused to discuss them specifically but said, "Anybody who's ever dealt with me knows not to mess with me."

And yet she is capable of bringing people back into her fold. When Frost's wife, a retired Army major general, was buried in September, he was touched that Pelosi interrupted her frantic campaign schedule to attend the service at Arlington National Cemetery and then walked more than a mile behind the caisson and riderless horse that took Kathryn Frost to her grave. Afterward, Pelosi asked Frost to visit her in her office. She appreciated the work he was doing to help Democratic candidates, she told him, and added that if the party won the House, she would be turning to him for more. "She could not have been more gracious," Frost says. "I was very appreciative. Whatever she needs me to do, I will do."

Still, pulling together is not something Democrats do well—even in victory. As the Pelosi-Hoyer-Murtha battle was heating up, Democratic consultant James Carville and pollster Stan Greenberg—both of whom are close to the Clintons—loudly called on Howard Dean to resign as Democratic chairman, saying the party could have won more House seats if he had spent its money more wisely. Liberal bloggers were slamming Emanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, saying he was taking credit for their victories. And the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of the most conservative House Democrats, was mounting a rear-guard campaign to save Harman's post at the Intelligence Committee. Savoring a team victory, it seems, is something the party has yet to get the hang of.

THE BALTIMORE EFFECT

Even as Democrats scratched their heads over Pelosi's judgment last week, they knew where it was coming from. "This isn't San Francisco," said a former Democratic-leadership aide. "This is Baltimore." The latter is where Pelosi grew up and where she got her first lessons in politics, from the best teacher anyone could want. When Nancy D'Alesandro was a child, her father used to collect yellow sheets of paper that were stacked and stapled together at the end of each week. They were called the "favor file." That was the way Baltimore's legendary Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr.—later known as "Big Tommy," to distinguish him from his namesake son who also became mayor—kept track of who had been given a job or some other benevolence. The record always came in handy at election time. From the age of 13, his only daughter Nancy took charge of the desk in their home on Albemarle Street, where people came to tell their stories and ask for help.

Knowing that also explains why the lefty caricature that Republicans paint of Pelosi has never quite stuck. Hers is not the loopy liberalism of San Francisco, where you can be branded as a right-wing extremist if you vote, as Pelosi once did, for cracking down on rave parties. The politicians in her family were progressives of a rougher cut, rooted in the Depression and the New Deal and in doing things for desperate people who turned to the government when there was nothing else for them to do.

You also didn't last long in big-city machine politics if you buckled at the first sign of a fight. When Big Tommy once threatened to fire striking garbage workers, Jimmy Hoffa himself sent an emissary to tell the mayor he wasn't happy. As D'Alesandro's former press secretary Tom J. O'Donnell recounted the story to the Washington Post, "The mayor spoke up and said, 'You go back and tell Mr. Jimmy I'm very unhappy with the garbage piling up on the streets of Baltimore, and I'm not going to stand for it.'" The following Monday, most of the garbagemen were back at work.

That fighting philosophy has defined Pelosi's leadership style as well. Her predecessor Dick Gephardt was known as "Ironbutt" for the hours he spent sitting and wheedling his colleagues. "Gephardt would plead with people to do the right thing, and they would know that there was no penalty for it," recalls a veteran senior aide on Capitol Hill. Not Pelosi. "Once you cross her," he says, "your life is not going to be very pleasant."

The Speaker-to-be puts it in more graphic terms. At lunch with a group of Time correspondents a few months ago, she said Republican attacks on her would not work, because she wouldn't let them. "If people are ripping your face off," she said, picking at a chicken salad dressed only with lemon wedges, "you have to rip their face off."

THE ROAD AHEAD

It was not entirely clear that Pelosi would ever make the family business anything more than a hobby. After graduating from an all-girls Roman Catholic college in Washington, she married Paul Pelosi, whom she met at summer school at Georgetown University and who would eventually make a fortune in investment banking and real estate. They moved first to New York City and then to San Francisco. Pelosi had five children in six years. Between diapers and laundry, she raised money for Democrats and ultimately became the state-party chairwoman.

But it turns out she was compiling a favor file of her own. Not only was she a prodigious fund raiser in a state that functions as a political atm for Democratic candidates across the country, but she also helped bring the national convention to her city in 1984. In 1987 she decided to run for the seat left vacant by the death of Sala Burton, the widow of Phillip Burton, who had run his own storied political machine. One of Sala's final acts was to give her endorsement to Nancy Pelosi.

In 2001 Pelosi made her first move toward the leadership with a bid for the No. 2 job, which pitted her against Hoyer. As it happens, the two had interned in the office of Senator Daniel Brewster of Maryland in 1963. That experience also introduced Pelosi to the different opportunities that Capitol Hill offered men and women. Hoyer "worked directly for me and helped me with a number of different projects," recalled Brewster, 83, in an interview last week with Capital News Service. Pelosi was a receptionist—or, as Brewster put it, "an excellent front person."

That first whip race intensified her rivalry with Hoyer and also cemented her bond with Murtha, who managed her campaign. Not only did he get her the votes to win that job but his support also made it possible for other old bulls in the House to begin to imagine a woman rising to the top. The former Marine had a reputation for male chauvinism that stood out even in an institution where the only private rest room adjacent to the chamber is for men. (Women members have to go around the corner and through a reception area to use a facility in Pelosi's office suite.) Murtha's backing "was the answer to sexism in the place," says an aide to Pelosi. "If he didn't have any problem with a woman in leadership, no one else would either."

But Pelosi has also found a way to make her gender a weapon in political combat. She was one of the loudest voices demanding an investigation into what G.O.P. leaders knew of the sexually explicit instant messages that Congressman Mark Foley, who has since resigned, was sending to congressional pages. While Republicans booed her on the House floor, Pelosi insisted "as a mother and a grandmother" on putting the question to a recorded vote.

She won that round over the Republicans, but that victory and all the others will be forgotten unless she can regain control over her own caucus. She didn't just politely suggest that people vote for Murtha; she fought hard. Her lieutenants plied the House with phone calls and none-too-subtle threats, including suggestions that anyone who bucked her might lose committee assignments. After Hoyer still drubbed Murtha by a vote of 149-86, Pelosi emerged from the ballot room and pronounced Hoyer's win "a stunning victory."

By the look on her face, she meant it. Pelosi went to Hoyer's party that night but retreated afterward to the downtown- Washington restaurant Tosca with a dozen or so of her closest allies. They entertained one another with stories about an old rivalry between Phil Burton and Texas Congressman—ultimately Speaker—Jim Wright that had divided the Democrats decades ago. Pelosi seemed cheerful and relaxed—anything but war weary. It was a reminder of something else that is true about Capitol Hill: what really matters in a fight is whether you're standing at the end of it.

• Karen Tumulty and Perry Bacon Jr.