Farewell to an American leader

I never found Nancy Pelosi very inspiring, but I could easily say the same for her predecessors: Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Dennis Hastert, Newt Gingrich. That’s kind of a rogues gallery. It is easy to imagine that the job only attracts people that are not likable, or that it brings out the worst in people. Or perhaps the problem is that they have all had to become one of the faces of Congress, which hasn’t had an approval rating above 40% since April of 2005.

King George was probably better liked.

The fact remains, though, that no recent Speaker has accomplished as much as Pelosi.

During her first time in the role, she pushed the Affordable Care Act through Congress. Many of us remember her urging her caucus to vote for the bill so we could find out what was in it. Some on the right quipped, “Vote for it first, read it later.” This strategy worked. Forty-six percent of Americans favored the ACA at the time of its passage compared to the 40% that did not. Now that we have had some time to live with it, 55% favor it. (Interestingly, it crossed over 50% in 2017, right when it was finally within the grasp of Republicans to repeal it.)

Pelosi also worked to pass the Dodd Frank Act in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, an act that sought to rein in Wall Street’s gambling with our retirement funds, savings, insurance, bonds, and mortgages, leaving the taxpayers — whose money they lost — to bail them out.

Pelosi also marshalled Obama’s stimulus package through Congress when others were pushing for austerity. Fake “fiscal hawks” from left, right, and center were sharply critical, but time has shown us that the package probably did too little rather than too much.

In her second turn as Speaker, she remained unpopular with the electorate. The bills she moved through Congress, however, were anything but. First, she pushed through the American Rescue Plan, an overwhelmingly popular stimulus plan that went big where the Obama plan went small.

She followed that with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, finally passing into law an expansion of background checks for gun purchasers that the electorate has approved of by large margins for years.

Next came the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, a huge investment in our country’s aging infrastructure that both parties had promised for more than a decade. Then came the CHIPS and Science Act, and following that she pushed the Inflation Reduction Act. Together, these three bills are the largest investment in our country’s future since Eisenhower. They expand what counts as infrastructure to include information, they help future-proof our economy by investing in domestic production of technology—from semiconductors to renewable energy — and they further expand the coverage of the Affordable Care Act while reducing the costs of prescription medications.

While her chief critics like to play like Pelosi is the second coming of Lenin (death panels and all), Pelosi’s record speaks for itself: she has pushed an agenda designed to help working class Americans get better access to healthcare, create jobs when we were losing them, curtail questionable banking practices that cost all of us dearly, pass commonsense gun legislation that most of us wanted, and invest in our future.

The polls are pretty clear about her accomplishments. These policies all have the support of anywhere from 55% to 73% of Americans.

What is all the more amazing is that with all the negative attention she gets — and it is quite a lot — in a town not known for its morality, and in a position where she has lived under a microscope, somehow Pelosi has avoided scandal.

If you do not like the work she has done, then you are in the minority. But even if you oppose these policies, you still have to admire that she was able to marshal so many successes in a place where stagnation is virtue, all the while shouldering criticisms and holding together a caucus that included those for whom her agenda was not liberal enough as well as those for whom it was far too liberal.

I am not suggesting we find room on Mount Rushmore for Pelosi, but maybe we could remember her times as Speaker for what she accomplished rather than what her opponents said about her. That she is not more popular is really more a reflection of us than her.