Edging Away From Inner Circle, Pelosi Asserts Authority

Now Democratic leaders worry that they must get some of the domestic agenda passed soon, to show voters they can govern, even as they are still dogged by a creative Republican resistance that has bedeviled Pelosi and her party.

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After the 2006 elections swept the Republicans from power, Pelosi stood as a historic figure, the highest-ranking elected woman in the nation's history. But she had no obvious models on which to build her speakership.

The last time a Democrat took the gavel from a Republican speaker was 1955, when Sam Rayburn (Tex.) resumed a speakership he had relinquished only two years before. The most recent Democratic speakers -- Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill (Mass.), Jim Wright (Tex.) and Thomas S. Foley (Wash.) -- reigned over a Democratic caucus that had grown complacent after decades in power. Those speakers passively allowed their powerful committee chairmen to set the legislative agenda.

Pelosi's situation made her most like Gingrich, another politically minded insurgent who assumed control after years in the minority. Like Gingrich, she rose not through the committee structure but by playing in the rougher world of politics.

Pelosi wanted to maintain the Republicans' much more centralized power structure but recognized that old bulls such as Dingell, David R. Obey (D-Wis.) and John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who had served as committee chairmen before the GOP swept to power, would have to be respected.

"There is a necessity for a unity of voice and purpose in the Democratic Party . . . and the only way you're going to do that was to have a central management to create consensus, not simply individual, discrete committee agendas," said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).

But as the face of that central power, Pelosi, who declined an interview request for this article, lacked Gingrich's flair for public appearances and off-the-cuff prognostication. Her sex made her extraordinary, but it was also something of a liability, leading her to be constantly underestimated, said Steve Elmendorf, who was chief of staff to Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) when he was House minority leader.

"We would have these private meetings when she was [House minority] leader where she was decisive, focused, even dismissive of people at times," Frank said. "I'd say to her, I'd beg her, 'Please, Nancy, be this person in public.' "

But to some Democrats, her biggest liability was the tight circle of confidants -- tough-minded fellow Bay Area liberals such as Reps. George Miller, Anna G. Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren; tart-tongued Reps. Edward J. Markey (Mass.) and Rosa DeLauro (Conn.); and gruff Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.) -- that allies worried would insulate her from public opinion and the rest of the caucus.

Even before she received the gavel, those fears appeared to be confirmed when she disastrously backed Murtha's challenge to Hoyer for majority leader. She saw the Iraq war as the defining issue of the time and extolled Murtha as the man to end it, but he was trounced.

"That was a defining moment for her," said Rep. C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger (D-Md.), whose political roots are entangled with Pelosi's in Baltimore, where she grew up. "It made her stronger, because she understood then that she really had to widen her circle."