Madam Speaker? Pelosi Likes the Sound

SEATTLE — It's only 9 a.m. and Nancy Pelosi has already had two breakfasts and a bowl of chocolate ice cream. The House minority leader has met with a couple of donors in a hotel dining room, run back up to her room for a live radio interview, down to the dining room again for a sit-down with the local newspapers, and up to her room for a phone strategy session.

She is, as ever, exquisitely dressed, in a stylish pale-green suit that she will wear three times in the next three days. Packing light saves time. Everything must fit into one carry-on and a garment bag, which she lugs herself, clacking across airports in her high heels.

With less than three weeks before an election that will decide control of Congress, the Democrats are within tantalizing reach of a House win that would almost certainly make Pelosi the first female speaker of the House -- second in line to the presidency -- and the first from California.

They need to gain 15 seats to take control, and Pelosi falls asleep at night crunching the numbers. It is her single burning obsession to lead her party to victory, and she devotes nearly every waking minute to it, coaching candidates, raising money and calculating in which districts to spend it.

In three years as minority leader she has raised record amounts of cash and preached party unity that has helped bring 201 unruly Democrats to the brink of power.

Yet Pelosi is not necessarily the public face most Democrats would have chosen to represent a party struggling to look strong in these unsettled times -- a 66-year-old liberal congresswoman from war-protesting San Francisco who looks too demure to stand up for national security and isn't great on TV.

Republican ad campaigns cast her as a caricature of liberal excess; depicted with eyes bulging and mouth agape, she looks like she's about to pop a blood vessel or bite somebody.

"Look, if I weren't effective, I don't think they would try to take me down. You're in the arena, you're in the ring. That's what happens," Pelosi says on the way to another fundraiser as she crisscrosses the country, her cellphone affixed to her ear in the car, at breakfast and in the beauty salon, where she recently dropped it into a pedicure bowl.

She has raised more money than any congressional Democrat -- $100 million since she was elected leader nearly four years ago -- half of it in this election cycle alone, tapping her wealthy ideological soul mates and cultivating small donors with direct mail and the Internet.