Years ago I spent Election Day in San Francisco with Rep. Nancy Pelosi as she made her way around town. She was elegant, smart and popular, moving from restaurant to clubhouse to street corner in the Italian hilltop neighborhood of a city that is more like her native Baltimore than tourists realize. It seemed that her ambition, and perhaps her destiny, was to be a Democratic Boss in the manner of her late father, who had been Baltimore mayor.

If Speaker-to-be Pelosi is going to succeed as Speaker of the House, she had better learn—fast—from the fiasco known as the Hoyer-Murtha Race. She violated every conceivable rule of Boss-like behavior: she lost, she lost publicly, she lost after issuing useless and unenforceable threats to people she barely had met, knowing (or having reason to know) that they would tell the world about her unsuccessful arm-twisting. And she lost big: by 149 to 86 votes.

One of the first rules of politics is that power is the appearance of power. Especially early in the game, you don’t risk that aura on a fight you are not sure you can win. The contest for 10018 was a secret ballot, which lessened the power of arm-twisting. Also, Rep. Steny Hoyer (another Maryland product) had worked hard for many months to secure verbal commitments from across the Democratic membership. Such commitments are hard to undo, even if the person trying to undo them is about to become the Speaker.

Pelosi changed course, never a good idea for a wannabe Boss. Her original plan was to stay neutral in the race between Hoyer and Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania. Then she quietly started making calls for Murtha, whom she felt she owed a debt of gratitude for his willingness to oppose the war in Iraq. Then she accepted his request to make a public endorsement (in the form of a letter) and she set about to seriously pressure members to back her man. By then it was already too late. In the last week the Hill and the city were abuzz with stories about Pelosi’s hard-line tactics. But rather than engender fear—and remember, it is better to be feared than loved—the moves engendered derision. The last thing you want them to be doing is laughing at you.

People questioned her motives, too. Did she really feel indebted to Jack Murtha, or was she continuing a decades-long feud with Hoyer, who had run against her for Democratic whip? Pelosi has a reputation for demanding total loyalty from her team, but if Murtha was on her team, why hadn’t she been backing him openly for months? And if it was a personal matter, why should the entire Democratic House membership be dragged into helping her settle it? What was in it for them?

Nothing, apparently.

Murtha also was a flawed vehicle: brave on Iraq, to be sure, but otherwise known around town as a rather narrowly focused, earmark-hungry journeyman. He didn’t further his cause (or Pelosi’s) by declaring that the only reason he was interested in ethics reform was because the Speaker-to-be was interested in it. It also didn’t help Murtha that he was the star of FBI surveillance tapes in the ABSCAM influence-peddling case two decades ago. He wasn’t charged with a crime, but the video inevitably became a YouTube hit in recent weeks. Here’s another rule for the successful Boss: don’t back someone for leadership who is a lead player in FBI tapes.

Does any of this mean that Pelosi’s speakership is defunct before it begins? Of course not. Democrats have an interest in seeing her succeed. They don’t want to play into the Republicans’ hands by turning the Democratic-controlled Congress into a soap opera. They don’t want the first female speaker to be a failure. Most Democrats agree with her on many agenda items.

Much is up to Pelosi. She has a reputation for never forgetting a slight or forgiving an enemy. But she has to realize that, this time at least, she was her own worst enemy.