Pelosi wins the day

It wasn’t. She had just delivered a promise decades of her predecessors failed to bring home, harnessing her uncommon focus, vote-counting acumen and consensus-building skills to bring tens of millions of Americans a giant leap closer to having health insurance coverage with a 220-215 roll call.
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Somebody asked me if this was a victory for [President] Barack Obama. It’s not. This victory belongs to her,” said House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.). “As far as I know she never sleeps nor eats.”
The bill’s fate, for now, rests across the Capitol in the hands of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). But with Saturday’s vote, Pelosi proved yet again she is the able master of a Democratic Caucus that is enjoying its greatest political and legislative success since at least the beginning of the Clinton administration and arguably since its legislative heyday in the mid-1960s.

Democrats, including Pelosi, view the push for expanding the government’s role in the health care system as a new plank in the social justice platform constructed with Civil Rights, Voting Rights, open housing and Medicare laws enacted during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, when Democrats held similar – and at times even larger — majorities in the House.

For all the work that went into pulling together the votes for the bill – the president, Cabinet secretaries, legions of White House aides, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s deft touch with conservative Blue Dogs and senior lawmakers, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and his team of vote-counting lieutenants, progressive grassroots organizations and any number of others who could rightly take credit for a piece of the victory – no one could doubt that it took Pelosi’s leadership to deliver a congressional vote in favor of a national health care system that eluded President Bill Clinton, Sen. Ted Kennedy and Dingell’s father, who first introduced such a bill in 1943.

“The president appreciates the speaker's strong committed leadership without which this historic vote would not have occurred,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told POLITICO in an e-mail as soon as the vote was secured. “Every American who is barred from insurance because of a pre-existing condition, every American who can't afford coverage or is hurt today by out-of-pocket costs that are more than they can bear, owes Nancy Pelosi a debt of gratitude tonight for the leadership she has provided to move us close to a new and better day.”
Her colleagues say Pelosi’s drive separates her from her peers.