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Pelosi is working hard to prevent that prediction from coming true. During a House Democratic retreat in Pennsylvania in January, she brought in her team of California consultants to lecture party bosses on how to win back the chamber. Organize better at the grass roots, they said, and stop wasting dollars on congressional districts where the Democrat has no chance of winning. "I have a reptilian approach," she says. "You have to be very cold-blooded in how you allocate resources." So the party is bypassing races in Ohio and Michigan, where redistricting has given Republicans the edge, and targeting millions of dollars on races against vulnerable G.O.P. incumbents in such states as Connecticut and Iowa. Last week the House Democrats launched a fundraising program that Pelosi has been pushing. Patterned after a similar program that DeLay began for his party in 2000, it will seek to get Democratic Representatives in safe districts to donate money from their campaigns or political-action committees to Democrats in tougher races.
A stylish grandmother of five who wears Armani suits and a permanent moonbeam smile, Pelosi, 62, grew up in Baltimore, Md., where both her father and brother served as mayor. She moved to California in 1969 with her husband, a San Francisco investment banker, and toiled as a party activist and fundraiser before running for Congress in 1987. Her signature issues--human rights, aids funding, environmental protection--put her as far as any Representative from DeLay, a pro-business Christian conservative from Sugar Land, Texas, whose nickname is "the Hammer" because of his take-no-prisoners approach to politics.
And yet the two have been friendly for years. DeLay once shocked Pelosi when he accepted an invitation to tour AIDS-treatment facilities with her in San Francisco. And she was touched when he slipped into her Feb. 6 swearing-in ceremony as whip to pay his respects. They may recognize in each other kindred political instincts. Pelosi ran a three-year insurgency to snare the whip's job from the initial favorite, Maryland Congressman Steny Hoyer, by raising millions of campaign dollars in California and funneling them to grateful members of Congress. DeLay did the same to win his post in 1994.
And they both have their eye on bigger jobs. Pelosi is quietly angling to be speaker of the House if the Democrats retake the chamber and Gephardt resigns to run for President in 2004. DeLay is similarly maneuvering for majority leader Dick Armey's job; within 36 hours of Armey's announcement in December that he would retire at the end of this term, DeLay and top lieutenants had phoned all 222 Republican Congressmen to try to lock in their votes.
Both leaders, however, find that deft persuasion often works better than hard-line tactics. Despite the bullwhip he keeps on a window ledge in his Capitol office, DeLay gets his way on most votes by carefully cultivating Republicans. During late-night sessions, Republicans crowd into his office to chat and munch on barbecue or pizza; Pelosi served Chinese takeout to Democrats in her office during midnight votes on campaign-finance reform in February and assembled a task force of 100 members to beat back more than a dozen amendments that DeLay had designed to sink the measure. "I threw everything I could think of at her," DeLay said, "and she handled it very well."