Pelosi Supports Full Troop Withdrawal By 2013

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she disagreed with her party’s major Democratic presidential nominees on whether there should be a continued U.S. troop presence in Iraq in 2013.

At last month’s Democratic presidential debate, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Sen. John Edwards all declined to pledge to remove all U.S forces from Iraq by 2013.

“I think the Democrats in the House of Representatives are much more optimistic than that,” Pelosi said on Fox News Sunday. “My view would be much more optimistic than what our presidential candidates are saying.”

Pelosi also said that she prays for President Bush to change his policies “all the time” and specifically has prayed for him to sign SCHIP legislation that would expand health insurance for uninsured children.

“First of all I pray for President Bush all the time, and I pray especially hard that he would sign the children’s health bill because it’s so important for America’s children,” she said. “I pray that he makes the right decisions for the American people.”

But she added she doesn’t pray specifically “for a political outcome.”

“We just pray that God’s will will be done. We pray for the children, we pray for poor people, we pray for people who need help,” she said. “And we always, always, always pray for our men and women in uniform who make our freedom to pray possible."