November 16, 2006
Not-So-Iron Ladies Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:05 PM EST A few days ago, Joshua Zeitz wrote about the leadership contest in the House of Representatives, which pitted Maryland’s Steny Hoyer against Pennsylvania’s John Murtha for the position of Democratic caucus leader. Early this afternoon the contest was decided in Hoyer’s favor by a vote of 149-86. The biggest loser in this election, however, was not the badly beaten Murtha. Instead, it was his most enthusiastic supporter, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi put an awful lot of political capital on the line backing Murtha for the leadership. She publicly endorsed him. She deployed some of her closest allies, George Miller and Anna Eshoo, to whip members on Murtha’s behalf. She even tried using her ability to dole out committee assignments to pressure newly elected members, like New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, into voting for the Pennsylvania Democrat. And yet, on a secret ballot, all of these efforts could not deliver more than 86 votes for Murtha—barely a third of the Democratic caucus. Nancy Pelosi is set to be the first female leader of the House of Representatives. If she wants to keep that position, she might do well to spend some time reflecting on the demise of another female parliamentary leader, and how to avoid her fate.
Sixteen years ago this month, Margaret Thatcher was faced with a leadership challenge from her onetime defense minister, Michael Heseltine. Thatcher had led her party through a period of consistent dominance for over a decade. But when a dispute within the Conservative ranks about Britain’s relationship to Europe resulted in an open attack on the prime minister, her power suddenly evaporated. In November of 1990 U.S. News and World Report declared that even if Thatcher survived the challenge from Heseltine, her “iron grip on the party has been broken and the aura of invincibility built by three straight election victories has been shattered.”
Heseltine failed to oust Thatcher on the first ballot, but the prime minister also failed to end his challenge by a decisive majority. By the time of the next ballot, several more candidates had entered the leadership election, including Thatcher’s eventual successor, John Major. In the interim, Thatcher had withdrawn her name from consideration and effectively ended her term in office.
Obviously there are many differences between Thatcher’s predicament and Pelosi’s. The challenge to Thatcher came at the end of a long reign, while Pelosi’s defeat comes at the very start of her term. The challenge to Thatcher was direct and personal, while this rebuke of Pelosi comes through a proxy. Thatcher was the leader of a government, whereas Pelosi has yet to take office as the leader of a single legislative body. Still, there is a lesson Pelosi would do well to learn from Thatcher’s astonishingly quick demise, and that is that one sign of weakness can be all it takes to unravel a political career.
For Pelosi, that sign of weakness has come remarkably early. If I were Steny Hoyer, I’d start thinking beyond the majority leader’s office.
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