Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

Last week, it seemed as if Nancy Pelosi’s iron grip on the speaker’s gavel was loosening ever so slightly.

Ferocious backlash from the left turned her draft resolution—initially intended to implicitly rebuke rising progressive star Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for her comments questioning the “allegiance” to America by supporters of Israel—into a broader statement about all forms of bigotry. Conservatives, such as National Review’s Matthew Continetti, charged the House speaker with timidity, unwilling to shame Omar by keeping the emphasis solely on anti-Semitism. “She’s supposed to be this Iron Lady,” he wrote. “But her hands are covered in Palmolive … [It’s] undeniable that AOC & co. is in charge.”


Undaunted, Pelosi threw another brushback pitch at the left this week, telling the Washington Post, and those on the left itching for President Donald Trump’s early ouster, that she is “not for impeachment” because it would be “so divisive to the country.” Although a handful of pro-impeachment lawmakers said they would forge ahead, many prominent House Democrats backed her up. Even “AOC,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a supposed caucus rebel who has already declared Trump guilty of impeachable offenses, bowed to her leader: “Legally, I don't think it's something that can ever be 100 percent off the table, but if that's how she feels right now, I respect that.”

When Pelosi triumphantly returned to power after a midterm election that featured many an aspiring House member threatening not to choose her for speaker—and again when she outmaneuvered the president during the recent shutdown imbroglio—the narrative in the chattering class was that she was a supergenius who was running circles around her hapless foes. Remember all those memes about her orange power coat?

Now, the question hanging over Washington is whether even Pelosi can control her wayward caucus, bursting at the seams as it is with mic-hogging progressives like Omar and Ocasio-Cortez on the one hand, and increasingly frustrated moderates like New Mexico Rep. Xochitl Torres Small on the other. “Democrats in disarray” often teeters between being a hot take by lazy pundits and comical reality. But if someone as skilled as Pelosi can’t keep her ideologically sprawling members inside the party’s big tent, many will begin to wonder if anybody can.

So, is the speaker still in charge? The short answer is clearly yes. She has single-handedly sidelined top progressive movement priorities that she finds half-baked and off-message: “Medicare for All,” “Green New Deal” and now, impeachment. At the same time, with relative ease, she has successfully moved through the House legislation that attracts support across the party’s ideological spectrum: expansion of voting rights and universal background checks for gun purchases.

And yet it’s the populist-socialist policies Pelosi quietly shivs that grab the most attention, leaving the impression, however inaccurate, that they are representative of the Democratic Party’s agenda. And as the Omar episode demonstrates, her’s control of the deeply diverse Democratic Party can be severely tested when ideological tensions combine with religious and racial differences.

Although she did not break, Pelosi had to bend more than ever to keep the party together in the wake of Omar’s remarks. She won unanimous Democratic support for her anti-hate resolution, avoiding the kind of rupture over anti-Semitism that prompted eight members of Parliament to quit Britain’s Labour Party. Still, she could not prevent the fissure over Israel from surfacing, and we can’t presume it has been healed. As debate over American policy toward Israel continues, it remains to be seen if the letter of the resolution—which declares that “accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to the Jewish community than to the United States constitutes anti-Semitism”—will be followed by all who voted for it.

If Pelosi is keeping the Democratic Party from drowning in ideological excess, it can appear like it’s only by sticking her own fingers in the dike. All the pressure to push the envelope on policy is coming from the insurgent left. What do we hear from the moderate-pragmatist wing of the party? Not much, beyond the occasional whine that it is being overlooked.

“Suddenly, an entire party is being branded by the perspectives of two of its members who represent 1 percent of the caucus,” first-term Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips groused to POLITICO Magazine’s Tim Alberta. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer similarly huffed, “We’ve got 62 new members. Not three.”

True. So why aren’t the other 59 grabbing the microphone?

Last month, Ocasio-Cortez mocked detractors of her Green New Deal for ceding the ideas turf to her: “I’m at least trying and they’re not … If you’re trying, you’ve got all the power, you’re driving the agenda … No one else has even tried … Until you do it, I’m the boss.”

On one hand, her braggadocio was as inaccurate as it was arrogant. Many in Congress have sought to enact ambitious climate legislation over the past several years, including the “cap-and-trade” bill that Pelosi helped get through the House in 2009. (Back then, eight Republicans provided the margin of victory, though of course, that was not enough to propel it through the Senate.)

This year, a carbon tax bill, the not-so-snazzy named Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, has been introduced with 18 co-sponsors including one lonely Republican, Florida Rep. Francis Rooney. (Note: That’s one more Republican than the Green New Deal has.) Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left, to their discredit, have pretended this bill doesn’t exist, in an attempt to suggest the Green New Deal is the only game in town. If they were as interested in moving the “Overton Window” as they claim, they would welcome parallel efforts, rather than ignoring or snidely dismissing them.

Nevertheless, Ocasio-Cortez also has a point. By grabbing the mic to push a big idea, however flawed or grandiose its details may be, she is seen as trying and, therefore, drives the agenda. Moderate pragmatists haven’t similarly rallied behind and loudly promoted their own alternatives. Perhaps they will eventually get there. Pelosi created a select committee to draft climate legislation. And the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition has assembled a climate task force. But by being slow off the mark, it has ceded the spotlight to its socialist colleagues.

Without many signature ideas of their own to prove their moderate bona fides, red-district Democrats have been susceptible to divisive Republican amendments. For example, moderates broke ranks to help Republicans modify the background check bill with a provision to require that undocumented immigrants who try to by guns be reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency increasingly loathed on the left. (Pelosi had to take a break from corralling the left to scold her right flank for aiding and abetting Republican mischief, which appears to have curtailed the aisle-crossing for the time being.)

Surely, individual Democrats in reddish districts are pleased that, on the whole, Pelosi is watching out for them. Newly elected Rep. Gil Cisneros of California said of Pelosi’s impeachment snub, “It does alleviate some of the pressure.” That’s what Pelosi has been doing; absorbing the pressure from the left and keeping it off her most vulnerable members. As a result, Pelosi’s entire persona has been transformed. Five months ago, moderates like Cisneros were shunning Pelosi to avoid being yoked to the Republican caricature of her as San Francisco liberal elitist. Now, Republicans share Pelosi memes and her quotes to buttress their arguments against the Green New Deal and impeachment.

Pelosi has done much for the moderates in her caucus, and it’s in the moderates’ interest to return the favor. Unless they get in the ideas game, and show how big the Democratic tent is, it won’t matter how much control Pelosi wields inside the House chamber. On the outside, rightly or wrongly, Ocasio-Cortez will appear to be the boss. And Republicans in 2020 will have a new caricature with which to yoke.