As the vote comes up today for passage of Health Care Reform, it is becoming evident that should the bill pass (and in all likelihood it will) that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will emerge as the central hero of this story.
After the Massachusetts debacle, WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was calling for a scaled-down piecemeal approach to HCR. It was Speaker Pelosi who weighed in and chopped off Rahm's other fingers:
In the jittery days following Scott Brown’s Senate victory, Nancy Pelosi was eager to resurrect comprehensive health reform. But first, she had to get past longtime ally Rahm Emanuel, who was counseling President Barack Obama to consider a smaller, piecemeal approach.
During a mid-February conference call with top House Democrats, Pelosi made it clear she would accept nothing short of a big-bang health care push – dismissing the White House chief of staff as an "incrementalist."
Pelosi even coined a term to describe Emanuel’s scaled-down approach: "Kiddie Care," according to a person privy to the call.
http://www.politico.com/...
Here we have Rahm Emmanuel once again on the wrong side of history. Wrong on Iraq and wrong on HCR. On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi, the most progressive Speaker of the House ever takes the DLC wing of the Democratic Party to school. Thankfully, the President sided with the Speaker.
"I think [Pelosi] is the one who has kept the steel in the President’s back – and I think she represents that to Harry Reid too," Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Pelosi’s closest friend in Congress, told POLITICO.
"White Houses end up with – how do I say this? — they take an incrementalism pill," added Eshoo. "But Nancy Pelosi is not an incrementalist."
Thank you Madame Speaker. I know that some of your San Francisco constituents give you grief for not being liberal enough but on a national stage we couldn't ask for anyone better than you!