Politico and The Denver Post hosted a morning breakfast panel Tuesday, August 26, 2008, featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. | Robert A. Reeder Pelosi says polls shortchange Obama

DENVER — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told convention-goers Tuesday morning that polls are underestimating the strength of Barack Obama, contending he will defeat John McCain with the support of new or intermittent voters, who are not generally polled.

“I’m very comfortable with those polls,” Pelosi said at a rooftop breakfast panel near the Democratic National Convention. “I think he is trouncing him. I want more of a spread, of course — I want it all.”


Pelosi paused to chuckle along with the crowd, then added: “We will get much more in the House and the Senate, and we have to have a Democratic president — nothing less is at stake than our economy, our Constitution, our budget, our reputation in the world, ending this war — the list goes on.”

“We cannot be diverted to the silliness that the McCain campaign — of course they want to talk about Paris Hilton,” Pelosi told the panel, presented by Yahoo News, Politico and The Denver Post. “Would they want to talk about why they have the worst record of job creation in America?”

See Also: Video Pelosi on McCain's houses

The speaker said Obama and the other Democratic presidential candidates “have attracted millions of more voters — first-voters voters and many more voters who haven’t voted in a long time.

“Many of them are not even reachable by these pollsters,” Pelosi said. “These are polls of likely voters. Likely voters are people who have voted in the last two elections, and they are likely to vote again. They are not the universe of people who will vote on Nov. 4.”

Pelosi said the key is to “deliver clarity of message about what the choice is, and deliver force on the ground.”

“We will own the ground Election Day,” she said.

Pelosi, the chairman of the convention, was one of the few speakers at Monday’s opening session to be tough on John McCain. Other speakers were criticized on blogs and on cable television for giving the presumptive Republican nominee a pass.

“I wasn’t taking any hits at John McCain — I was just speaking truth about his record,” she said. “When they talk about John McCain having experience, he has the experience of being wrong — on the war in Iraq, on children’s health, on energy independence, on tax cuts —you name it.”

Pelosi said she sees McCain’s initial inability to name the number of houses he owns as “emblematic of the differences between Democrats and Republicans.”

“Democrats have wealth, too — we salute wealth,” she said. "But let me tell you this: This election is about the economy. It always is, and it’s a question of who has the leverage. And for eight years, the wealthiest 1 percent has had the leverage.”

The speaker said Democrats are tough on national security but were rightly skeptical of the real threat from Iraq.

“Think of me as a lioness — you threaten my cubs, you have a problem,” she said.

Pelosi said that if Obama is elected, the first 100 days of his administration would be “a period of civility and reaching out to Republicans.”

President Bush, she said, “was very isolated — he doesn’t want to work in a bipartisan way. Barack Obama does.”

Pelosi also said she see a new emphasis on fiscal discipline, transparency and honest in government.

Pelosi said a bill to make health insurance available to 10 million children, which Democrats have tried repeatedly to pass, “will be one of the first bills we would put on the president’s desk.”

She said that with — “God willing” — a President Obama, the country also would speed the withdrawal from Iraq.

Pelosi said: “That’s not a full 100-days agenda. It’s more like 100 hours.”

On the Democrats’ domestic agenda, she said she wants listeners to think of four words: “Science, science, science and science.”

“I think that could take up the 100 days,” she said.

Pelosi also vowed that Democrats would continue to use its investigative power to hold the Bush administration accountable: “This isn’t over — we have Karl Rove to deal with.”

But she said that having the “exercise” of trying to impeach President Bush would be “viewed as a political act” and would not be effective.

Pelosi praised Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) for what she called his “courageous” appearance at the convention, followed by Obama's wife, the evening's keynote speaker. “Just when you had seen it all … the beautiful, beautiful presentation by Michelle Obama.”

Pelosi declined to compare McCain to a popular culture figure, as his campaign has compared Obama to Paris Hilton. “I’ll leave that to the popular culture folks,” she said.

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