The Speaker Is in the House

None of this helps Obama's agenda. Sure, it's always a bonus when Cheney comes up from the cellar to scare the electorate. But the left's demand for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth brings back those noxious memories of the Democrats' passivity at the time—and makes it hard to resist Cheney's call to reveal how much the interrogations saved America from another 9/11. Democrats are at risk once again of being cast as soft on terror—a role Obama is keen to shed.

For her part, Pelosi knows she needs to protect her liberal flank. "You can't take prosecution off the table," she told me carefully back in April. "The president has been very clear. He wants to move forward. Me and the Congress want to be told the truth. The more things get released, the more we want a full commission. He wants to give immunity. I want to be more selective. He says go with immunity and maybe you will learn more. It's very hard."

It's hard, all right, especially given that such issues separate her from a popular president whose progressive agenda she mostly shares. To date, she's had a strong, if not close, relationship with Obama; during the stimulus debate, she spoke with him as much as three times a week. When I suggest she doesn't want to waste Obama's time, she bridles with a flash of speakerly autonomy: "No. Nor do I wish to waste mine!" (She talks more often to his chief of staff, former representative Rahm Emanuel, who she says "is like family to us.")

Pelosi knows how to follow up the ice pick with a stroke of the velvet glove. After she helped her fellow Californian, Henry Waxman, oust venerated Michigan Rep. John Dingell as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in a surprise coup, she mounted a generous tribute to Dingell three months later in a ceremony at Statuary Hall in the Capitol, celebrating his 53 years of service. One of her mantras is "This job is not for the faint of heart." Alexandra Pelosi recalls that when a GOP critic called her mother "Tom DeLay in a skirt," Pelosi just smiled and commented, "What a disturbing image."

She works like a Trojan. Her days start with a blow-dry at 7 a.m. at the Hotel George alongside such fellow early-rising power women as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Jamie Gangel from the Today show and NBC's Norah O'Donnell, and end with her never-missed TV fix of Jon Stewart. She's kept her figure, without recourse to the gym. Her husband gave her an exercise bike, but Alexandra says she found her mother one evening cycling away to CNN while spooning a tub of ice cream and poring over briefing papers. It's a preposterous fact that she turns 70 next year. She knows how to listen, as perhaps only a mother of five and grandmother of seven can. "When she's in a small setting, she's as effective as any politician I've been around," former representative Harold Ford told me of his experience watching Pelosi resolve conflicts between her liberal base and his fellow Blue Dog Democrats. "I can't remember a fight she didn't win."

In the first wave of the Republican onslaught, four top Democratic senators rose up to lambaste the CIA for releasing 10 pages of torture documents at the request of a Republican congressman, giving 40 instances in which the CIA briefed members of Congress between September 2002 and March 2009 (albeit vaguely). Said MichiganDemocratic Sen. Carl Levin: "I think there is so much embarrassment in some quarters [of the CIA] that people are going to try to shift some of the responsibility to others."

The GOP will keep gunning for her; she's a far easier target than Obama. And she will continue, too, to face fire from within her own ranks—both from the left and from the increasingly disaffected Blue Dogs elected last year.

She's marshaling her forces. Former senator Bob Graham of Florida, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee during the briefings, went on record in The New York Times on Friday, saying he did not recall waterboarding being discussed.

And no one underestimates Pelosi's ability to fight her way out of a tight corner. "If you look at the lion family," longtime Democratic House leader Richard Gephardt told me admiringly about the first woman to be Speaker, "it's the female of the species that's the killer."

Brown is the cofounder and editor of The Daily Beast and author of The Diana Chronicles.

© 2009