So far, Nancy Pelosi has come off looking more like Nancy Grace than Nancy Drew.
But that may be about to change as the California Democrat prepares to make history as the first woman Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the first woman to stand third in line in the order of presidential sucession.
Pelosi, who got off to a stumbling start after the Nov. 7 election gave her the keys to the ornate Speaker's office, defused her latest crisis on Friday by appointing Texas Rep. Sylvester Reyes as her compromise choice to chair the House Intelligence Committee.
That allowed her to avoid a nasty family fight with the Congressional Black Caucus, which wanted one of its own, Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings, the only member of Congress ever to be impeached and removed from office as a federal judge, to chair the committee, and an equally counter-productive fight with supporters of fellow California Rep. Jane Harmon, the ranking committee member who wanted the job.
But Harmon, a onetime friend of Pelosi , incurred the latter's wrath by her aggressive courting of the news media -- she made far more appearances on network TV talk shows than Pelosi -- and by her refusal to challenge President Bush on intelligence matters. Faced with a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't choice, Pelosi bit the bullet and picked Reyes as a face-saving compromise.
The Black Caucus wasn't pleased, but for the sake of party unity, swallowed hard and said, like the Mafia when it rubs out a rival, it's not personal, it's only business. And even Harmon, a former Carter White House aide, bit her tongue and said Pelosi did the right thing.
The Intelligence Committee fight came hard on the heels of Pelosi's futile support of firebrand Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha in his challenge to Maryland's more moderate Steny Hoyer to become Pelosi's top lieutenant as majority whip, a position that Tom Delay parlayed into real power after Newt Gingrich took over as Speaker in 1995 and gave way to his avuncular successor, Denny Hastert.
If there's one thing we know about Pelosi, it's that she is good at holding grudges. She never forgave Hoyer for having the temerity to challenge her for the minority leader's job, but recognizing that the perfect is the enemy of the good, she gritted her teeth and welcomed him as her deputy after the Democratic caucus overwhelmingly voted for Hoyer.
Now, having navigated between the Scylla and Charybis of Murtha and Hoyer on the one hand, and Hastings and Harmon on the other, she seems ready to confront her next challenge, which is to decide just how much she wants to reform House ethics rules.
The old Democratic bulls who are regaining key committee chairmanships like Michigan's John Dingell and John Conyers, Wisconsin's Dave Obey, New York's Charlie Rangel. Mississippi's Bennie Thompson and Massachusett's Barney Frank, know she has to make good on Democrats' promise to root out the corrupting influence of lobbyists and corporate fat cats.
But they also understand that purifying the pond kills the lily pads, and they don't want her to go as far as some of the public interest groups want her to, like banning corporate and PAC contributions to political campaigns. If she can figure out how to finesse that issue, as she has the first two big challenges she has faced since Nov. 7, Nancy Pelosi may increase the odds that a woman can run the House just as well as a man can.