Nancy Pelosi, underrated talent
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been right about a lot. She was right in the early 1990s, when, as a fierce critic of China’s human rights record, she rejected the bipartisan faith that economic liberalisation in China would inevitably lead to greater democratisation. She was right again in 2003 when, as the leader of the House Democrats, she was one of the few party leaders to oppose the war in Iraq. Ms Pelosi was right throughout Obama’s administration, when she struggled to make the president see that his fetish for bipartisanship was leading him to make pointless concessions to Republicans, who would never negotiate in good faith.
There is a pattern in Pelosi, Molly Ball’s admiring and illuminating new biography of the most powerful woman in American politics. Again and again, Ms Pelosi is dismissed, first as a dilettante housewife, then as a far-left San Francisco kook, finally as an establishment dinosaur — and throughout, as a woman. She perseveres, driven by a steely faith in her own abilities. And more often than not, she is vindicated.
Ms Pelosi was born to a prominent Democratic family in Baltimore, but the San Francisco network of influence that led her to Congress was one she built herself. When she entered the House of Representatives in 1987, women were a rarity in the chamber and absent from leadership. Sexual harassment and belittlement were constant. Twenty years later, she became the first-ever female House speaker. And in 2019, after regaining the top spot in the chamber, she came to preside over the most diverse Democratic caucus in history, one she did as much as anyone to elect.
For the first time in her public life, Ms Pelosi became an icon, lauded for her unparalleled ability to get under Donald Trump’s skin. In one of her first meetings with the president when she was speaker, she helped goad him into taking public responsibility for an imminent government shutdown. Video of her strolling out of the White House in a chic Max Mara coat, putting on her tortoise shell sunglasses with a sly smile, appeared in countless memes. “It was as if America, after years of fixation on her weaknesses, had suddenly woken up to her strengths,” Ms Ball writes.
Reading Pelosi, it’s hard to know exactly how Ms Pelosi sees the threat that Mr Trump poses. Despite meticulous reporting and multiple interviews with the House speaker, Ms Ball, Time magazine’s national political correspondent, doesn’t penetrate her steely exterior, as she herself acknowledges. Ms Pelosi, she writes, “is a private person, and her inner life is fundamentally off limits.” To understand her, we can only look to her record.
Parts of that record should comfort those who fear that Ms Pelosi is going soft. One of the book’s most telling anecdotes involves the late congressman Jack Murtha, a grizzled, conservative Democrat from Pennsylvania. An ex-marine, Murtha initially supported the Iraq war, but in November 2005 he called a news conference to decry it and demand a sixmonth timetable for withdrawal It was a turning point in the public’s understanding of the war.
Yet as Murtha became a major face of opposition to the Iraq war, Ms Pelosi remained silent, enraging antiwar activists who believed she’d left Murtha out on a limb. “Pelosi let them criticise her even though she knew the truth: She and Murtha had orchestrated the whole thing, and agreed that it had to look like a one-man crusade,” Ms Ball writes. Both believed his withdrawal proposal would carry greater weight if he didn’t seem to be working with the caucus’s left flank.
Here we see one of the more striking things about Ms Pelosi: She’s willing to advance her policy goals at the expense of her own image. Ms Pelosi likes to repeat a quotation from Abraham Lincoln: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” It was a line she invoked to explain her reluctance to impeach Mr Trump, infuriating people — myself included — who believed she was following rather than leading. But Ms Ball has made me think we were misunderstanding Ms Pelosi; the speaker was emphasising the importance of shaping public opinion before acting, not using public opinion as a reason not to act.
Likewise, her willingness to collaborate with Mr Trump, even if it gives him legislative accomplishments to tout, is genuine. Ms Pelosi has always been a progressive; until the last few years, the right used her as the ultimate symbol of left-wing extremism. But her relentlessly pragmatic approach to politics is the polar opposite of, say, the Bernie Sanders approach. Pelosi doesn’t begin by asking what kind of world we want. She asks where the votes are. The speaker is, as she herself has said, a master legislator. “If this book has a thesis, it is that you needn’t agree with Nancy Pelosi’s politics to respect her accomplishments and appreciate her historic career,” Ms Ball says. But you can do that and still wonder if, at this moment, her skill at making the system work is enough to check a man happy to destroy it.