Why McCarthy should still watch Pelosi’s goodbye
It’s a shame that Kevin McCarthy skipped Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 15-minute speech on Thursday announcing she was stepping down as the House’s Democratic leader. For the California Republican, it was an ungracious act, of course, but also something worse.
Ignoring Pelosi was a big mistake, because McCarthy has a lot to learn about what made her consequential. So do the Democratic leaders who will follow her.
There was no shortage of thoughtful tributes to Pelosi that made much of her many legislative and political skills. The list is long: staying on top of the needs of her members, understanding their districts, demonstrating consistent adeptness at counting votes, knowing how to persuade and cajole, being very shrewd about which fights to pick, and when to pick them.
Americans got a rare inside look at her coolness under pressure in the videos of her response while the Capitol was under attack last year. And in a nation that has been shamefully slow in lifting a woman to the highest office in the land, her shattering of gender barriers and stereotypes is a blessing and a hope.
But the most important lesson she has to teach is one that our politics could use most of all. She did not succeed merely because she was proficient. She made a difference because she had an overarching purpose.
Pelosi-ism, if we can call it that, comes down to this: If you don’t have principles that define what you’re fighting for, there’s no point to being in politics. But if you’re impractical, you won’t achieve your objectives. You’ll lose.
The idea that it’s a false choice to insist a politician can be either principled or practical but not both was driven home for me during an interview with the writer Jonathan Cohn, author of “The Ten Year War,” the definitive account of the passage and survival of the Affordable Care Act. Cohn did not discount the roles of President Barack Obama or Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid in passing what we call Obamacare. But he told me flatly: “Without Pelosi, there is no Affordable Care Act.”
Her indispensable role was to insist that Democrats press on even after they lost their 60th vote in the Senate after the unexpected victory of Republican Scott Brown in the January 2010 special election in Massachusetts. Many of her House colleagues and some key figures in the Obama White House wanted to back off the major reform effort and instead pass a token bill — one Pelosi derided, as Cohn reported in his book, as the “eensy weensy spider teeny-tiny” bill.
Ultimately, her much-touted legislative skills allowed Pelosi and Reid (no slouch on these matters himself) to create the complicated process that got Obamacare on the books without 60 Senate votes. But there would have been no path at all if Pelosi had not held the line and bucked up the will of her colleagues.
Pelosi’s marriage of liberal vision and programmatic pragmatism creates the odd spectacle of progressives criticizing her as too willing to compromise even as conservatives denounce her as some wild-eyed leftist. The truth is that she is neither a sellout nor an inflexible ideologue.
None of this means that progressives should stop pushing for bigger and better. And, yes, sometimes, pragmatic compromises give up more than is necessary. But progress is still better than glorious defeat. The lesson for centrists is that you can’t achieve historic change by beating unnecessarily hasty retreats and evading necessary fights.
As for McCarthy, he can still watch Pelosi’s speech in the quiet of his office. While he does, he might ask himself whether his own “why” involves more than being remembered as the guy who organized a whole lot of Hunter Biden hearings.