The First Woman Shadow President

It looks like a Democratic shadow government is forming in the House in an attempt to fill some of the vacuum created by the failure of the Bush administration. Today, Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic foreign policy leadership in the House are on a fact-finding trip to Iraq.

What's significant is that it's a House Democratic trip not a House of Representatives trip. No Republicans were invited. That makes Nancy Pelosi into a kind of shadow president.

Of course, Pelosi is not the first shadow president. Thomas Jefferson was the president in waiting during the Adams administration while Newt Gingrich functioned as a shadow president from the 1994 election to the government shut-down in 1995.

But Pelosi is the first woman shadow president.