Pelosi's moment

The California legislator, who reshaped the Democratic campaign, could be House Speaker.

On election night 2004, Nancy Pelosi faced a painful reality: her party was again a big loser, failing to win the presidency and losing three more House seats. Pundits were suggesting Pelosi should accept her fate as the leader of a permanent House minority.

However, the California legislator had a different idea. Instead, she reached out to advertising executives, internet moguls and language specialists to ask how Democrats could rise from the ashes and challenge President Bush and the Republicans. The advice was unabashed: "You must take him down", and then hammer away at the differences between the two parties, Pelosi recalled.

Today, the Democrats appear capable of taking back leadership of the House after 12 years in the minority, for reasons largely beyond Pelosi's control: an unpopular war, an unpopular president and a series of scandals that have left the Republicans vulnerable.

Nevertheless, if the Democrats win, experts say, much credit is due to this 66-year-old woman, whose notable fund-raising abilities (she raised $50 million this election cycle) and scorched-earth strategy of refusing to negotiate with the GOP have put her on track towards becoming the first woman Speaker of the House.

Favourite target

Dismissed by her critics as too liberal, too elitist and too lacking in gravitas, Pelosi, serving her tenth term, has proved to be a tough-minded tactician who has led her caucus from the political centre and kept the fractious House Democrats in line. By hanging in together, the Democrats have thwarted many GOP initiatives, including the centrepiece of Bush's second-term agenda, restructuring Social Security.

That approach, while emboldening the Democrats, has earned Pelosi the enmity of House Republicans, who claim she is an obstructionist. Pelosi, who is married to a San Francisco businessman and wears designer suits, is a favourite target of conservatives. Throughout the campaign, Republicans have sought to scare voters by portraying Pelosi as a liberal extremist who would be weak on national security and prone to raising taxes if her party were back in control.

Even before the Democrats' disappointing show in the 2002 midterm elections, Pelosi began making calls to gather support for a minority-leader bid, in case Representative Dick Gephardt, D-Missouri, decides to step aside to run for president. Within days of Gephardt's decision to retire from the House, she locked up the post convincingly, by a vote of 177 to 29.

She developed a Democratic message that highlighted shortcomings in the Bush agenda. Her strategy was to unite Democrats behind non-threatening, core issues such as the minimum wage, healthcare, social security and energy independence while steering clear of divisive social issues such as abortion rights and gun control.

While Pelosi appears at ease, and chatty in informal gatherings, she often comes across as stiff and tentative in public. After a halting performance on NBC's Meet the Press in May, Pelosi worked with media experts to polish her style. Some conservative Democrats say she has given them a voice in forming policy by creating a number of advisory groups that focus on, among other things, rural issues and faith. "It's much easier to hold the party together if the people who feel the most disaffected feel well-treated," said David Rohde, a professor of political science at Duke University.

Representative Collin Peterson, D-Minnesota, is one of those conservatives. "I have always believed that it takes someone of the same political persuasion to convince the folks on the left that we're not going to be able to govern if we don't come to the centre," he said. This summer, Peterson invited her to his rural district - where she looked comfortable eating a pork chop on a stick and vowed to direct energy money to the Midwest, instead of the Middle East.

Colleagues say Pelosi's polished Pacific Heights exterior belies an iron-fist management style. One of her first moves was to take control over who gets the most coveted committees - Ways and Means, Appropriations and Energy and Commerce.

The newspaper Roll Call said in December that Pelosi threatened to remove Representative Edolphus Towns, D-New York, from the Energy and Commerce Committee for siding with Republicans on a key trade bill. And despite objections from the Congressional Black Caucus and others, she demanded the removal of Representative William Jefferson, D-Louisiana, from the Ways and Means Committee after authorities caught him accepting $100,000, allegedly as a bribe. The ousting of Jefferson startled even the Republicans.

Pelosi's biggest challenge was in trying to forge a consensus on the war in Iraq. She had been highly critical of Dick Gephardt's support for the war in the autumn of 2002 and helped gather 126 Democratic votes against the resolution authorising an invasion of Iraq. However, as the new minority leader, Pelosi, initially, took the position that it was the Republicans' war, for the Republicans to fix. Privately, however, she spent months conferring with Representative John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, a Vietnam War veteran and prominent voice on military matters, who had voted for the war but was now souring on it. Pelosi knew that her voice would not be as credible as Murtha's.

The two planned Murtha's surprise turnaround a year ago, when he demanded immediate withdrawal of US troops. Two weeks later, Pelosi followed his lead. Should the Democrats win, Pelosi said, their majority will push for a phased withdrawal of troops, to be completed by the end of 2007.

At the same time, she said, the new majority would move to raise the minimum wage, allow the government to negotiate directly with drug companies for lower prices for seniors, repeal corporate incentives to take jobs overseas, make college tuition tax-deductible, and implement all the recommendations of the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks and securing nuclear material from former Soviet states.

Some Democrats complain that Pelosi relies on a tight coterie of advisers. But in describing her dealings with fellow Democrats, Pelosi says: "I expect a certain level of discipline when we have agreed on where we're going." Some members, she says, "mistake my courtesy for a lack of strength sometimes, and they ought not to do that".