Pelosi's first unforced error

John Podhoretz:

DEFEATED Republicans are strangely jubilant, while victorious Democrats are shaking their heads in dismay. Why, oh why, did civil war have to erupt inside the Democratic Party only a week after its stunning triumph in the midterm elections?

Item: Washington's new No. 1 Dem, Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, decided she wanted her sleazy born-again-peacenik buddy Jack Murtha to be the House majority leader. That's the No. 2 slot. Not so fast, said the House's current No. 2 Dem, Steny Hoyer: He forcefully pushed back against Pelosi's efforts to oust him and trounced Murtha in yesterday's vote of Democratic House members.

So Pelosi and Hoyer - who ran against each other for the post of minority leader in 2001 and are said to dislike and distrust each other - must now work together on the complex task of managing the rules and structure of the House of Representatives.

Item: James Carville is calling for the head of Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party. He likens Dean to Donald Rumsfeld - perhaps the nastiest thing Carville could imagine saying - and actually blames the Man from Yeeargh for spending money in a way that limited Democratic gains in the House to 29. They could have been 40 to 50, some Dems are saying. Dean must fry.

Yes, it seems like a disaster for the Democrats.

Only it isn't. This behavior is a sign of the Democratic Party's health, not its weakness.

Dems have power on Capitol Hill for the first time in a dozen years after winning around 53 percent of the vote for House seats last Tuesday.

And House Democrats have made several correct judgments about their victory. The first is that Nancy Pelosi was not its architect and requires little or no deference. If anything, they won in spite of her, not because of her.

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Podhoretz thinks the Democrats need more such fights. Perhaps they do. Hoyer obviously was strong enough to save them from the disaster that would have befell them had Murtha been successful. He is also a much more astute politician than Pelosi who is too liberal and not too bright.

Howard Fineman notes:

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If Speaker-to-be Pelosi is going to succeed as Speaker of the House, she had better learn—fast—from the fiasco known as the Hoyer-Murtha Race. She violated every conceivable rule of Boss-like behavior: she lost, she lost publicly, she lost after issuing useless and unenforceable threats to people she barely had met, knowing (or having reason to know) that they would tell the world about her unsuccessful arm-twisting. And she lost big: by 149 to 86 votes.

One of the first rules of politics is that power is the appearance of power. Especially early in the game, you don’t risk that aura on a fight you are not sure you can win. The contest for 10018 was a secret ballot, which lessened the power of arm-twisting. Also, Rep. Steny Hoyer (another Maryland product) had worked hard for many months to secure verbal commitments from across the Democratic membership. Such commitments are hard to undo, even if the person trying to undo them is about to become the Speaker.

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One of the reasons guys like Hoyer and Tom DeLay are successful leaders in the House is they know how to count votes and they do not fight on issues they cannot win. Pelosi's hammer missed the mark. She had her associates attempt heavy handed "persuasion" and she failed miserably. Now she will have even less influence.