Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited The Commonwealth Club of California and was in conversation with Club President/CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy. A crowd of about 450 in the Mark Hopkins Hotel ballroom in San Francisco listened to Pelosi discuss the challenges of getting a health-care reform bill through Congress, upcoming priorities for Congress (including financial sector regulation, immigration reform, the deficit, and more), and the possibilities of bipartisan cooperation in the hyper-polarized nation's capital (she thinks it's possible on an issue-by-issue basis).
Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-California) returns to her home town and to The Commonwealth Club audiences to discuss the recent passage of the controversial and historic health-care reform bill.
San Francisco's Pelosi is in her second term as speaker of the House. President Obama has lauded her as "an extraordinary leader for the American people"; and following the passage of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, England's Guardian observed that "Pelosi is being heralded as the most powerful woman in American history and the most powerful speaker of the House of Representatives in a century."
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Former U.S. Representative Tom Campbell’s departure from California’s gubernatorial race last week has shaken things up in the Golden State… kind of. While he’d been arguably the best qualified of the GOP candidates – with a Harvard law degree, a Ph.D. in economics, a long history of public service – his financially magnificent adversaries Meg Whitman (former eBay chief) and Steve Poizner (state insurance commissioner) have already brought to bear a collective $50 million in campaign funds, an amount that the former dean of UC Berkeley’s business school was simply unable to match.
For a taste of Campbell's approach to public finances, watch the video above, in which Campbell gives The Commonwealth Club's 2008 economic forecast. Whitman will discuss her plans for the governor's office in a February 16 speech to The Commonwealth Club in Lafayette.
As Campbell moves on to less-competitive pastures (on the other hand, now he’s contending for a Senate seat with former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina? hmm), Whitman and Poizner are preparing to square off in earnest.
Whitman, who has delivered a strong message to Californians with months of radio spots and campaign advertisements, has a lead of 45 percent to 17 percent over Commissioner Poizner in a recent Field Poll. The same poll indicates that Whitman’s campaign clearly benefited the most from Campbell’s exit, picking up moderate, financially conservative voters and putting her even further ahead of her remaining, quiet challenger.
The balance will doubtlessly change as Poizner finally loosens his purse strings – but after Whitman’s shock-and-awe strategy, will it be too late? Thirty-eight percent of Republican voters remain undecided, yes; but 20 percent say they view Poizner unfavorably. That’s 17-percent positive versus 20 percent negative. It’s a simple metric, sure, but it looks like the California GOP may actually prefer Poizner to run for the other team.
Would it be too impish to suggest that the Democrats are also working toward a GOP win? All of its candidates have successively dropped out of the race against a man who hasn’t even announced a formal candidacy, yet: former California Governor (1974-1983) and current California Attorney General Jerry Brown. The mayor of L.A., the mayor of San Francisco and the lieutenant governor were all able to assess their collective chances as less than excellent against the man who fought Clinton all the way to the Democratic National Convention in ’92.
But then, Brown did it almost on a dare, using only a $100-per-person contribution limit and an 800 number. Maybe he is the one to challenge Whitman — the most likely GOP candidate, at this time.
Perhaps predictably, both sides of the party line are acknowledging the economy as a primary issue in the gubernatorial election. The impact of Republican Scott Brown’s recent Senate win in Massachusetts, too, reveals an important shift as voters begin leaning away from Washington and toward small-government, fiscally conservative candidates – campaign finances aside, of course.
E.J. Dionne's column in today's Washington Post sheds a quite divergent view of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. It should be noted that Dionne is somewhat liberal and the idea of Pelosi as someone moving the country toward so-called "San Francisco liberalism" is a right-wing talking point. Nonetheless, the profile illuminates a possible congressional road map for the rest of the year.
Pelosi, in the article, lauded Republicans for voting with their convictions. The speaker is in a seemingly conciliatory mood as Congress heads into recess. It also helps that she will spend Easter at her Bay Area home before visiting the Commonwealth Club next Wednesday.
Pelosi told Dionne, "'The priority, of course, is to pass health care,' Pelosi said without blinking." The American Prospect's Ezra Klein notes in his blog that this is the first indication Pelosi sees health-care reform as a top priority over cap-and-trade.
To my knowledge, Pelosi hasn't said that before. More to the point, she's not signaled it. At a recent Maria Leavey breakfast, she implied just the opposite, and many folks I've spoken to on the Hill have suggested that her priority was energy rather than health care.
To reverse that specific perception, Pelosi seemed to be giving Dionne a lesson on congressional parliamentary procedure by saying she could muster 51 percent of the votes on health care under the rules of "reconciliation" where committees receive technical instructions on where and how funding will be budgeted. In effect, it's a promise that health care will be legislated but without specifics. Under the procedure, a bill only needs a simple majority, whereas a bill without reconciliation needs a more problematic 60 votes in the Senate. Pelosi also referred to the diversity of the party that also has the support of some coal-producing states. She showed Dionne a statue of a coal miner in her office given to her by a West Virginia congressman.
Dionne also mentions the recent relaxing of Republican attacks against Pelosi. With President Obama's post-election popularity too strong to spar with, Republicans targeted Pelosi without abandon. An article on Politico from last November claimed that the tactic has failed every time it has been utilized: "It didn’t work in 2006, and it’s not working this year, yet many Republicans continue to use Pelosi power as the ultimate threat to American governance."
Presumably, with a bit less than 100 days of the Obama presidency to work with, Republicans are turning their criticism toward the White House. Karl Rove ironically believes Obama is more divisive than President Bush (according to today's Wall Street Journal).
Despite the constant attacks on her leadership, Pelosi has proven to be a speaker unfazed thus far. Whether Pelosi can help th president push through Democratic-themed legislation like health-care reform is unclear, but it shows that it takes more pieces of the puzzle to assemble than one might think.
Vilsack (pictured above at his Feb. 13, 2007, speech to The Commonwealth Club of California) was, very briefly, a competitor of Obama's for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he withdrew early in the contest and threw his support behind New York's junior senator, Hillary Clinton. For those of you keeping score, that means Vilsack joins former candidates Clinton, Bill Richardson, and Joe Biden as Obama administration officials. Can Mike Gravel still get a position?
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