Media

'Nancy Pelosi and her army of whips had counted the votes and counted them again. But as they conferred in Pelosi's warren of offices just off the Capitol Rotunda in June, it seemed there was no way to get them to add up to 218. That's a majority in the House, the number it would take to pass the climate-change legislation the Speaker calls 'my flagship issue.' But in the middle of a recession, the measure that Republicans were calling a job killer seemed too much to ask of her stressed-out caucus, especially after Democrats had already put their necks on the line to bail out Wall Street and the auto industry and to pass a $787 billion economic-stimulus package, and when they were looking ahead to a massive overhaul of the health care system. Further, it would probably be futile. The Senate might not follow, and even the White House was sending mixed signals as to whether it wanted to do this on top of everything else it had going on in Barack Obama's first year in office....'