Nancy Pelosi is Running the Country

As the Democrats scramble to make Rush Limbaugh the de facto head of the GOP, it's become increasingly obvious that Nancy Pelosi is now the de facto president (from Top of the Ticket):

First, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) allowed more than 8,000 pet projects in the $410-billion spending bill, defending earmarks as "an appropriate function of the Congress" and giving Republicans a rallying cry against pork.

Then she put the bill on the fast track -- telling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that the House would accept no amendments and robbing President Obama of any chance to pick up Republican support, as he did on his earmark-free $787-billion stimulus plan.

"I believe the president was absolutely sincere in looking for a bipartisan outcome," said Rep. Charlie Dent, a Republican from Allentown, Pa. "But the White House lost control of the process when the bill was outsourced to Pelosi."

And today, minutes before Obama laid out his proposals to reform the earmark process, House leaders were offering recommendations of their own in an effort to deflect his.

Meanwhile, Pelosi and her chief deputy, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), have made clear to Team Obama that Congress, not the White House, will decide how to write its spending bills, thank you very much. In an interview with reporters last week, Hoyer said:

I don't think the White House has the ability to tell us what to do. I hope you all got that down.

Maybe the honeymoon is over.

Less than three months into the new Congress, the Reid-Pelosi partnership is showing signs of strain. “The tension between the two chambers is becoming very strong, especially the Pelosi-Reid rivalry," Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University, told the Christian Science Monitor.

As for the president and the house speaker, Newsweek declares: Obama has "a Pelosi problem."

A sharp-elbowed San Francisco multimillionaire who battled her way to the top of a club still dominated by men, she has no intention of being Obama's gofer. Pelosi, who declined to be interviewed for this story, spent years plotting the Democrats' 2006 comeback. Obama can talk all he wants about "bipartisanship" -- her job is to keep the GOP in the minority. Pelosi was dismissive of suggestions that she should have been more solicitous of the other side. "Yes, we wrote this bill," Pelosi said at a press conference. "Yes, we won this election."

The result: "This tension has left the president and the Speaker with a complicated relationship that hovers somewhere between friend and frenemy."

Bottom line - Obama is weak, too weak to deal with San Fran Nan. She's pushing him around as though he were a junior staffer.

Harry Reid isn't any better. He's clearly afraid of her.

Pelosi could never be elected president so she's doing the next best thing - running the country without running for the job.