Pelosi Says No Health Care This Year

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POLITICO 44

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.