Speaker Nancy Pelosi on how D.C. lost its mojo.

Question: Do you think Washington is made for big ideas?

Nancy Pelosi: No. <laughs> And it's following its own natural instinct. Washington is a city of the status quo where incremental-ism has been the order of the day. That, by the way, is not the tradition of our founders. Our founding fathers were entrepreneurial thinkers; they thought big. Just review what they did. And they thought it, and they wrote a constitution that enabled us to think big. Somewhere along the way we got stuck in the status quo city of Washington, D.C. But when Democrats took the majority we sought to unlock that stranglehold, that status quo thinking has on Washington. We made some major changes in legislation-- but with a new President to sign the bills we'll be able to do much more.

Recorded on: June 24, 2008