As I pointed out yesterday, the president’s empty “Strategy For Victory” speech has one unintended consequence: it pushed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a bit further in the direction of sanity, as she declared that she would follow John Murtha’s lead.

In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Weisman writes under the headline, “Democratic Lawmakers Splinter on Iraq:
Many Surprised as Pelosi Calls for a Fast Pullout:” (registration required). Here are the first few paragraphs–

Nancy Pelosi’s embrace Wednesday of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq highlighted the Democratic Party’s fissures on war policy, putting the House’s top Democrat at odds with her second in command while upsetting a consensus developing in the Senate.

For months now, Democratic leaders have grown increasingly aggressive in their critiques of President Bush’s policies in Iraq but have been largely content to keep their own war strategies vague or under wraps. That ended Wednesday when Pelosi (D-Calif.) aggressively endorsed a proposal by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, leaving only a much smaller rapid-reaction force in the region.

The move caught some in the party by surprise. It threw a wrench into a carefully calibrated Democratic theme emerging in the Senate that called for 2006 to be a “significant year of progress” in Iraq, with Iraqi security forces making measurable progress toward relieving U.S. troops of combat duties. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said last month that “it’s time to take the training wheels off the Iraqi government.”

What’s more, House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) issued a statement Wednesday that was in marked contrast to Pelosi’s. “I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation’s security and credibility,” he said.

It’s still hard to know what motivated Pelosi to change her stance but it could be, as the piece says, that the activist core of the Democratic Party is just fed up with the position of the party’s leadership on Iraq.