I gotta tell you, I have listened to a lot of Nancy Pelosi interviews over the last couple of years in this job, and her demeanor during a post-health-care-decision interview with Scott Shafer today was about as relaxed and unprogrammed as I've heard here. (Jump straight to the interview here.)
With good reason, perhaps. In 2010, Pelosi was instrumental in reviving the health care bill when it seemed all but dead. Before the final House vote, The New York Times recounted her pivotal role:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi was at her wits’ end, and she let President Obama know it. Scott Brown, the upstart Republican, had just won his Senate race in Massachusetts, a victory that seemed to doom Mr. Obama’s dream of overhauling the nation’s health care system. The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once Ms. Pelosi’s right hand man on Capitol Hill, was pushing Mr. Obama to scale back his ambitions and pursue a pared-down bill.
Mr. Obama seemed open to the idea, though it was clearly not his first choice. Ms. Pelosi scoffed. “Kiddie care,” she called the scaled-down plan, derisively, in private.
In a series of impassioned conversations, over the telephone and in the Oval Office, she conveyed her frustration to the president, according to four people familiar with the talks. If she and Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, were going to stick out their necks for Mr. Obama’s top legislative priority, Ms. Pelosi wanted assurances that the president would too. At the White House, aides to Mr. Obama say, he also wanted assurances; he needed to hear that the leaders could pass his far-reaching plan.
“We’re in the majority,” Ms. Pelosi told the president. “We’ll never have a better majority in your presidency in numbers than we’ve got right now. We can make this work...”
That Mr. Obama has come this far — within a whisper of passing historic social legislation — is remarkable in itself. But the story of how he did it is not his alone. It is the story of how a struggling president partnered with a pair of experienced legislators — Ms. Pelosi and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Reid — to reach for a goal that Mr. Obama has often said had eluded his predecessors going back to Theodore Roosevelt. (Full article here)
But the feeling of ecstatic victory among Pelosi's House Democrats after the bill finally became law turned to one of bitter defeat after her party was swept out of power in the 2010 election, costing her the speakership. A sense of foreboding about its prospects only deepened with polls showing the public mostly opposed to "Obamacare" even two years after its passage, perhaps in part because of intense negative advertising by opposition groups. After what appeared to be skeptical questioning during the oral arguments from a majority of justices -- including Anthony Kennedy, widely expected to be the swing vote -- the once-unthinkable become very much a possibility: that the law was going to be struck down, giving Republicans a huge victory on the eve of the presidential election.
So, many may have thought Pelosi was whistling past the graveyard when she recently predicted the court, conservative majority and all, would uphold the law 6-3.
The decision was 5-4. She almost had it right.