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Nancy Pelosi: 'Don't care how popular'

by Mark Silva

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, says this to the question of her being perceived as a "far-out liberal:''

"I don't choose to spend my time countering mischaracterizations that the other side puts out there. Because we are effective, I continue to be the target.''

She says so in an interview with Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, one of many interviews featured in an end-of-the-year "Interview Issue" of the magazine that attempts to answer a simple question that President John F. Kennedy once posited as the biggest challenge of any journalistic or biographical portrait: "What's he like?''

"We have a big tent in our party,'' Pelosi says to the question of discontent among liberal factions of her party these days, with some disappointed that the president they helped elect is now ramping up another war and the health-care overhaul that emerges may lack the most important element, a "public option.''

Obama, the speaker from San Francisco suggests, is a "president with a nation in crisis''an economic crisis, a budget crisis, climate crisis and two wars.

"People want change,'' Pelosi tells Newsweek, "but they are menaced by it, they are cautious about it.''

With the speaker's own public approval ratings running low lately , Pelosi is reminded that Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state and former first lady who challenged Obama for the party's presidential nomination, has gone through her own cycles of popularity and unpopularityriding high again in opinion polls.

"Well, I don't care how popular I am,'' Pelosi says. "I'm not putting myself out there to run for higher office.''

Maintaining that the Democratic Party "will be fine'' in the 2010 midterm congressional elections, Pelosi notes that she is "constantly raising money... I actually take some level of pride in the opponents I have gathered,'' Pelosi tells Clift. "It helps with my fundraising.''

Now we know a little more about "what she's like.''

(House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is pictured above at the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen. Photo by Kay Nietfeld / . Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are pictured at a news conferece at the summit below. Photos by Olivier Morina / AFP / Getty Images)

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