Pat Dollard

Tweet

Politico:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted Wednesday that job creation and deficit reduction will be the central Democratic themes for the coming year – and that public support for health care reform will rebound once a bill has been sent to President Barack Obama.

On the divisive issue of Afghanistan, the California Democrat ducked the question of how she would vote on increased war funding: “Let’s see what they request,” she said. But she has urged her party, including old allies on the anti-war left, to listen and give some “room” to Obama, recognizing that the president had been “dealt a very bad hand because there was no plan in Afghanistan for years.”

Pelosi made her comments at a year-end roundtable with reporters where she described herself as back in full “campaign mode” and confident House Democrats will retain “a strong majority” after the 2010 elections.

“He didn’t give me 72 hours notice,” she joked of Rep. Brian Baird’s surprise decision to not seek re-election in his swing district in Washington state. But Pelosi said her rule of politics was “don’t assume anything” and she wasn’t panicked by the recent spate of retirements in her ranks.

In the case of health care reform, Pelosi credited House Democrats with having saved Obama’s initiative after the onslaught of attacks during the August recess. And if the Senate can complete its bill this month, she will work to try to send a House-Senate compromise to the White House before the State of the Union.

“They will pass a bill and we will have a bill,” the speaker said, and once that happens, she predicted the focus will shift away from the differences among Democrats and more on what is in the package itself.

“We are in a define-or-be-defined occupation,” she said, and her adversaries have had the advantage of picking out single issues, such as abortion or the public option, to characterize the whole.

Matching the House bill against the still-evolving Senate package, she said she saw differences of affordability for families and the revenue-raisers that would have to be negotiated. But she downplayed differences over the public option for coverage, saying the emphasis had always been on giving consumers an insurance option, not that it be public or government run.

“We know that, between the two bills, we have the makings of a big difference for the American people,” Pelosi said. “When we have a bill . . . the discussion is no longer about the bishops or about the public options, and it’s about what’s in the bill for people.”

She plans to travel to Michigan for the Detroit auto show in January and is already pressing the Senate to respond quickly next month to a new job-creation package on the floor Wednesday. When a Michigan reporter asked her response to White House proposals about job-creating investments in environmental technologies, she bridled a bit: “We need no introduction to these subjects, and we’re thrilled that the White House is joining them.”

But in contrast with this past year, dominated by the Democrats aspirations for health care or climate change legislation, she said the grim federal debt now loomed over the agenda.

“There is a very, almost fierce determination to reduce the deficit,” she said, and repeatedly returned to her early years in Congress and budget battles under President Bill Clinton that contributed to the Democrats losing control of Congress in 1994.

“We’ve been here before,” she said. “We had to make very difficult decisions, and as you know, we paid a political price for it but we had to do it.”

Pelosi predicted in January ‘we’ll come to terms on a commission” such as those proposed to make recommendations to Congress on difficult deficit-reduction measures. But without mentioning Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) by name, she seemed cool still toward his legislation, which would usurp the speaker’s power over legislation and dictate an up-or down-House vote — without amendments — on whatever the commission recommends.

“I said pass it in the Senate,” the speaker said. “Send it to me, I’ll have to face it.” But when Senate leaders told her that it was unclear still if the Conrad plan had the 60 votes needed for passage, her answer was: “Then let’s talk about what we can both pass rather than talk about what some people think should happen but doesn’t really have the votes.”

“This is not a completely whole new ball game because we had to do it when President Clinton made the determination that we would go forward,” the speaker said. “We know how to do it — we’ll do it again.”