Pelosi’s First Drama

It’s hard to get a more dramatic demonstration of the rifts among the Democrats as Nancy Pelosi accedes in the House. The speaker-to-be had made it abundantly clear that the man she wanted for majority leader was an anti-war crank from Pennsylvania, John Murtha, a onetime military officer who has made it his bizarre mission to force a retreat from Iraq.For several news cycles the Drudge Report was headlining Mr. Murtha’s claim that he had the votes to win the minority leadership. He seems to have forgotten that the leadership is chosen by secret ballot. When the votes were counted, it was Mrs. Pelosi’s nemesis, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who got the job, and by a wide margin. Mr. Murtha was relegated to what the British would call the back benches.We take that to mean that, at least for the moment, the Democrats have decided, despite the lobbying of the next speaker, that they’re serious about defending their House majority in 2008. By a margin of 149 to 86, Democrats indicated that they recognize that their victory last week was not a call for surrender in Iraq.Indeed, the freshman class in Congress includes a number of important new faces who are specifically identified with support for the war and the idea of holding out for victory in Iraq. It would be a mistake to make too much of this, but it would also be a mistake to make too little of it.The drama unfolded even as top generals up on the Hill testified that immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake. Even then, Mrs. Pelosi tried to goad her colleagues into electing as majority leader a representative who had advocated just such an agenda.It didn’t help that had Mrs. Pelosi gotten her way, the majority leader of the party that campaigned against corruption would have been a man who was caught up in the Abscam scandal. The bulk of her caucus managed to see that voters last week acted against Republicans at least as much as for Democrats and that a swerve leftward would not advance their cause in 2008.Now Republicans need to show they realize their defeat was a call for them to return to their principles. Secure in the knowledge that Americans didn’t vote “for” the Democrats — since there wasn’t any platform for which to vote — Republicans now have an opportunity to spend the next two years giving Americans something to support. The last time they did that, in 1994, they did so under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, a committed fiscal conservative who could speak credibly about fiscal discipline.Republicans arguably sealed their 2006 fate when they elected John Boehner as majority leader to replace Tom DeLay. Mr. Boehner was free of any stain from the lobbying scandal, but he wasn’t the kind of inspiring leader who could give the base hope that a Republican majority in 2007 would be better than the old one had been.Now the Republicans can avoid making the same mistake by electing as minority leader a figure who has an expansive, big-tent view of conservative principles that inspire with ideas and calls to reform on taxes, social security, and education and to idealism in foreign affairs. They know where to find the basic template of the winning formula, the principles on which President Bush defeated the Democrats in 2004.

Pelosi’s First Drama

Pelosi’s First Drama

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