WASHINGTON AND SAN FRANCISCO — After decades scaling the Democratic Party ranks, Nancy Pelosi reached a pinnacle in January 2007, becoming the first woman speaker of the House.
For two years, alongside Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, she fashioned the party's agenda on Capitol Hill, fought a rear-guard action against the Bush administration and, more broadly, helped define what it means to be a Democrat.
Now, however, it's gotten crowded at the top.
Under President Obama, a breakthrough figure in his own right, the party has a new face, an ambitious platform and a commanding voice -- and Pelosi is discovering what it means to be back in a lesser role, with someone else setting the party's agenda and establishing its priorities.
The San Francisco Democrat says she is comfortable with her new position, after years of battling President George W. Bush.
"It's what we've hoped for, worked for, prayed for," Pelosi said of the Obama administration. "The difference between being the speaker without a president of your party and the speaker with Barack Obama as president is night and day."
But, inevitably, tensions have emerged.
Pelosi wants Bush's tax cuts for wealthy Americans to expire sooner than Obama has proposed. She is more receptive than Obama to a congressional investigation of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program and criminal prosecution of any officials who used torture as a weapon to fight terrorism.
She was a strong backer of a punitive tax on bonuses paid to AIG employees, a move that has drawn a cool response from Obama.
Pelosi questioned whether Obama's proposal for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq went far enough and made her feelings known in a frank discussion before the president revealed his plans, as well as in public statements after his announcement.
Although Obama has pledged a new spirit of bipartisanship in Washington and tried to win GOP support, Republicans complained that Pelosi had shut them out of negotiations on the economic stimulus bill. Privately, she counseled Obama and his advisors that courting House Republicans was a waste of time (and surely felt vindicated when not a single one voted to support the far-reaching legislation.)
"Yes, we wrote this bill," she told reporters amid the GOP griping. "We won this election."
That sort of blunt talk may reflect the reality in the House, where Pelosi has the power -- and the inclination, when she sees fit -- to run roughshod over the minority.
