So far in this campaign, the public has generally accepted the premise that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) would be as capable a commander in chief, if not more so, than any of her rivals.

This is no small achievement. The first viable female presidential candidate, Clinton has successfully neutralized the electorate’s deeply ingrained bias against women on issues like military and foreign policy. Indeed, she has used Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) relative inexperience in those fields against him with some success, as in the case of the now-famous 3 a.m. “red phone” ad.

Of course, that doesn’t change the obvious — that a woman president would in fact mark a dramatic change after 219 years of male leadership in the nation’s top office. The question is, what exactly would be different? How might it change the way the rest of the world sees the United States if the face we projected to the world was, for the first time, a woman’s face?
There is one federal officeholder who has begun to give Americans a sense of what the answer to that question might be, but it isn’t Clinton; rather, it’s the woman who will be sitting over Clinton’s left shoulder if she ever gets a chance to make a State of the Union address: the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

One might have expected, when Democrats took back Congress in 2006, that Pelosi would prefer to confine her fights with President Bush to the domestic arena, where the public generally tends to favor Democrats, and where the Constitution squarely places Congress’ authority. But Pelosi, emboldened by the public outcry against the Iraq war that propelled her into the speaker’s chair and the history books, made it clear from early on that she would be leading the charge against the president’s policies at home and abroad.

So she pushed a slew of proposals through the House designed to force Bush into withdrawing troops from the conflict, all of which ultimately met their deaths at the hands of a Senate filibuster or the president’s veto pen.

But while her push to end the war has been the most public of Pelosi’s fights since becoming speaker, it has hardly been her only foray into U.S. foreign policy. Last year, Pelosi announced that she would be leading a congressional delegation to Syria to meet with President Basher Assad. The State Department, which has listed Syria as a sponsor of terrorism, publicly denounced Pelosi’s plans and urged her to not to go. She ignored the warning, and images of Pelosi meeting with Assad were broadcast all over the world.

In just the past few weeks, Pelosi has continued using her influence to shape U.S. diplomacy. She earned a stern rebuke from the Chinese last month for publicly meeting with the Dalai Lama and criticizing China’s human rights record in Tibet. Undeterred, Pelosi called on Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised to do, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened.

Then, last week, Pelosi put her foot down when Bush sent Congress a trade agreement with Colombia that she felt didn’t address her concerns over its impact on American workers. The rules of Congress had required action on trade agreements sent by the White House within 90 days, but Pelosi simply pushed a rule change through the House to nullify the requirement.

To be sure, Pelosi is hardly the first woman to stake out a decisive role in foreign policy. The world has seen two women, secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, who have commanded the respect of presidents on pressing international questions.

But Albright and Rice were responsible for enforcing policies determined by their bosses. Pelosi, who holds higher office than either Albright or Rice achieved, has a grand pulpit to criticize and mold foreign policy in a way that has never been available to a woman. The columnist Camille Paglia called Pelosi’s trip to Syria “the best seat-of-the-pants performance yet of what a woman president might look like.”

But Pelosi-style diplomacy has also energized the speaker’s fiercest conservative critics, conveniently serving their favored caricature of the wide-eyed liberal Jezebel from San Francisco. Some even suggested that Pelosi’s Syria trip might have violated a federal statute that prohibits anyone but the president from engaging in foreign diplomacy.

Some of those doubts — over whether or not it’s appropriate for an opposition leader to take a public stance that might undermine a sitting president’s foreign policy — are legitimate. But after nearly eight years of damage inflicted on the American brand name abroad by the reckless, invade-now-and-ask-questions-later Bush Doctrine, it’s comforting to see an American politician subtly letting the world know that there are still a few people left in our corner of the globe who believe in talking to your enemies rather than just isolating them and denouncing governments that abuse fundamental human rights, no matter how inconvenient that may be.

And it’s kind of inspiring to see that message delivered by the 68-year-old mother of five and grandmother of six from California. All of those voters feverishly backing Hillary Clinton purely to see that last glass ceiling finally shattered might want to consider that Pelosi, a bit more quietly and without an enormous apparatus behind her, has set about crafting the image of a feminine American head of state that will probably serve as an example to whichever woman ultimately becomes the first to actually achieve that status.

Stephen Santulli is a senior in the College and a former editor in chief of THE HOYA. He can be reached at santulli@thehoya.com. THOUGHTCRIME appears every other Tuesday.