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When the next president addresses a joint session of Congress in 2009, the first female Speaker of the House could be sitting behind the first female president.
If that’s the case, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will be forging a relationship.
Both women have spent decades in Democratic politics and have smashed glass ceilings in government and politics. Yet those who know them and others who observe them say the two powerful Washington lawmakers have never developed a close bond.
“You might think the two of them would have a special relationship, but there is no sign of it,” said Marc Sandalow, who has written a biography of Pelosi.
There’s no antipathy or longstanding disagreement, those close to the two women say. They are just two people who’ve been resolutely focused on different things.
“Their accomplishments are on different tracks,” said former Pelosi chief of staff Carolyn Bartholomew, now a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Speaker Pelosi is firmly neutral in the Democratic nomination contest. Those who know her say she does not have a closer relationship with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who came to Washington and national Democratic politics much later than the Clintons.
A longtime prominent liberal in Congress, Pelosi did interact with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. She criticized him vehemently on China trade. She fought against his impeachment. He visited San Francisco and helped her raise lots of money.
But there’s no sign that their political relationship led to much contact with the then-first lady. Hillary Rodham Clinton devoted most of her time to healthcare policy, but she didn’t work closely with Congress.
Pelosi observers say that the future Speaker, much like other female politicians, had no more reason to build a relationship with a first lady than any male politician would have.
Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) cautioned against thinking female politicians would have closer bonds than male politicians.
“The fact that we’re women doesn’t necessarily mean we should have a special relationship,” said Tauscher, a Northern Californian who has endorsed Clinton. “I like to say we all put our big girl pants on and go to work every day like everybody else.”
President Clinton also did not enjoy as close a relationship with Democrats in Congress as President Bush has had with congressional Republicans during his tenure. After 1994, many Democrats blamed Clinton for the party’s loss of its hold on Congress. And Clinton famously employed a “triangulation” strategy to distance himself from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
Pelosi’s major engagement with the Clinton White House was on China, and her words at the time were far from complimentary toward the Democratic president. Pelosi viewed China as a country with a poor record on human rights. She had ardently criticized the Republican administration of President George H.W. Bush for its dealings with China, and hoped for better when a Democrat took the White House.
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