The Coming Democratic Disillusion

On Thursday, after eight years in the minority, Nancy Pelosi returned to power as speaker of the House of Representatives. Her party controls 235 seats to the Republicans' 199. One contest, in North Carolina, has yet to be decided. The Democratic majority is a couple seats larger than the one Pelosi led more than a decade ago. Back then a Republican resided in the White House as well. By the seventh year of his presidency, when some 100 U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq every month and gas on average cost $2.80 per gallon, George W. Bush was about as popular as Donald Trump is today. And in 2007, as we all remember, Pelosi's Democrats set about enacting universal health care and ending the war in Iraq.

Fooled you! Actually, the victories of the 110th Congress were much more modest: a minimum wage increase, lobbying reform, and a ban of incandescent light bulbs. Health care had to wait for a subsequent Congress and a Democratic president. So did withdrawal from Iraq—though retreat didn't work out as planned, and America returned, in much smaller numbers, in 2014. The history of Nancy Pelosi's tenure as speaker is a reminder of the limitations and tenuousness of political victories (and defeats).

I suspect Pelosi is aware of this lesson. I doubt her caucus is.

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