'Rising star' Allyson Schwartz led crusade against Weiner

U.S. REP. Allyson Schwartz is a pearl-necklace-wearing policy wonk who prides herself on picking her battles and choosing her words carefully. But sometimes she just has to speak her mind.

Even if it means telling one of her colleagues that he's being, well, a wiener.

Schwartz, who represents parts of Philadelphia and Montgomery counties, was the first Democratic member of Congress to publicly call on U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign last week in the wake of revelations that he'd sent explicit photos of himself to women he'd met on Twitter.

Other elected officials piled on, and yesterday Weiner quit. Schwartz, who has captured huge media attention for her move, said she was simply telling it like it is.

"I tend to be a little bit careful about this," said Schwartz, who was not in Washington when the Weiner news first broke because of the death of her father. "But maybe it's time for us to stand up and say this is unacceptable - as women in politics, men as well. It was a no-nonsense response."

But the move was also a show of strength from Schwartz as she rises in power and influence.

Since arriving in Congress in 2005 after 15 years in the state Senate, Schwartz has sought out influential allies like House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, worked her way onto powerful committees, made a name as a prodigious fundraiser and lobbied aggressively for her core issues, notably health care.

She's now on the foreign-affairs committee and holds the No. 2 job on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for which she is leading the effort to recruit candidates for the 2012 House elections - a role that could pay off big in the long run.

"There's no question she's viewed as a rising star in the Democratic caucus," said political analyst Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "You can tell that by the appointments she's gotten in the caucus and the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee].

"The Weiner thing is exceptional. She really isn't known as someone who gets in front of the cameras. . . . She's known more as a workhorse than a showboat."

Schwartz, 62, has needed that workhorse ethic to claw through the stodgy boys' club of Pennsylvania politics to become the highest-ranked elected female official in the state.

The steely New York City native burst onto the Philadelphia political scene in 1990 when she unseated Republican state Sen. Joseph Rocks in a rough-and-tumble campaign.