Recent Reading: Pelosi

 

A few days ago I finished Molly Ball's excellent book on Nancy Pelosi. There are, of course, many other recent and good books on the United States Congress such as Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer's The Hill To Die On about the fight to see which party would win a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, Julian Zelizer's book on New Gingrich (a deeply problematic and unethical figure), Carl Hulse's book on the Senate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, or Adam Jentelson's book on everything that is wrong with the Senate filibuster. Every one of these books, other than Ball's book on Pelosi, is a deeply depressing look at some aspect of the American Congress. The United States House of Representatives, to no one's surprise, is an institution that has become deeply broken. However, let me suggest that the life and career of Nancy Pelosi might give you a reason to believe that congress can do important and valuable work on behalf of the American people.

Pelosi is hardly an idealist with her head in the sand -- she knows how difficult it is to get things done. But, at least in my reading of Ball's book, she is a believer that government can and should be a force for positive change in the lives of ordinary Americans. In addition, Ball's book, at least for me, functioned both as a primer on how things are done in congress and as an inspiring story about an important woman. 

The one thing that Pelosi excels at is counting votes. She knows how to hold her caucus together and she does not put bills on the floor unless she knows the can pass. 

Lest you think that this is no big deal, consider the case of former Speaker John Boehner who resigned after coming to the conclusion that he could not keep Republicans in line. Boehner left congress, at least in my opinion, deeply sad at the ability of Republicans to accomplish anything meaningful. 

Boehner can be rather colorful in his post-congressional interviews. He does not hold back his opinions in this interview in Vanity Fair.

I think it is important to pause for a moment and recognize that, in the history of the United States, there has never been a female president, there has never been a female leader in the United States Senate, and there has only been one female Speaker of the House.

Take a minute and think about that.

And I do mean a full minute.

OK. Back to Ball's biography of Pelosi.

Before she even ran for elected office, Nancy Pelosi gave birth to and raised five children. I think it can not be emphasized enough that this experience helped shape Pelosi and gave her skills that became important when she was, later, elected to Congress. More hiring managers need to recognize that raised five children is a powerful line on a resume. In fact, raising any number of children.

It was the biggest key to her success. After so many years spent managing the emotions of toddlers, teenagers, and politicians, the three neediest and most egotistical types of people in existence, she had honed her instinctive grasp of human motivation to a fine point. And if there was one thing she had learned -- the sort of thing that seems obvious, that everyone knows in theory, but that the majority of people are too needy or self-centered to put into practice with any consistency -- it was that people love to be praised and love to be thanked, and no one ever complained about getting too much of either (pgs 105-106).

And yet, the press has been slow to acknowledge Pelosi's achievements when she became Speaker of the House

Not a single American newsmagazine featured her on the cover  -- not Time (which had made Newt Gingrich the Man of the Year in 1995), not Newsweek, not U.S. News. Feminism was out of fashion, and the culture wasn't ready to appreciate the complexity of a woman who was both devoted to her family and a hard-charging, ruthless pol. "Badass" had not yet entered the American lexicon as a characteristic for women to aspire to. It was the caricature of Pelosi as a rigid, ditzy, castrating, loony tunes liberal that seemed to take hold in the public mind (p. 123).

(One thing that Ball fails to emphasize, at least in my opinion, is how the right-wing media ecosystem, especially Fox News, plays a major role in attacking everything Democrats have accomplished. During the Trump years, people like Sean Hannity filled their shows with counter-programming to try and distract from the many failures of the Trump administration. In recent days and weeks, Tucker Carlson has used his platform on Fox News to raise doubts about vaccines in order to stop the Biden administration from claiming a public health victory. Think about that for a minute. It is better to have more people get sick and die than it is for people to be able to praise the efforts of President Biden. We have truly entered a dangerous media era.)

Back to the book.

Ball does say this about Nancy Pelosi's relationship with the press:

The press respected Pelosi but tended to find her boring. She didn't have a big, colorful personality like [former White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel, nor did she share his self-mythologizing instincts. She wasn't loose or chummy, and her quirks weren't relatable to the overwhelmingly male Capitol Hill press corps; she reminded them of a strict teacher or a demanding mother-in-law. Her sense of humor was prim verging on childish, and she never swore. In interviews, she revealed little, tending to repeat the same talking points; her speeches were salted with the same worn-out slogans, touchstone quotations and alliterative mnemonics. She disdained gossip and distrusted  most reporters, sometimes freezing them out for a story or column she didn't like. Tightly wound and officious, Pelosi's persona was the opposite of the folksiness fetishized by the political media.

Aides had brought in speaking coaches, and Pelosi had improved since the early days, but she still struggled as a public speaker and sometimes made embarrassing gaffes. Once, a press aide, trying to give constructive feedback, informed her that a certain speech had been a bit meandering; for weeks afterward, every time she came offstage, she would snap at him, "How was that? Did I meander?" Her habit of repeating talking points was actually an improvement over her tendency to wander off message (pgs. 157-158).

About Pelosi's relationship with President Trump.

In my opinion, Nancy Pelosi was the most important check on the misguided power of Donald Trump. And she frequently got the best of him in negotiations. When Trump threatened to shut down the government, and own the shutdown, over funding for a wall, Pelosi called his bluff. After the meeting, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had a brief press conference.

When it was Pelosi's turn to speak, she simply said, "He does not have the votes in the House to pass whatever his agenda is with that wall in it."

Even as she spoke, the image was catching fire. The little grin, the rust red coat, the sunglasses, the cooly calculated woman who'd flustered the raging president without breaking a sweat -- liberals on twitter were passing around images and bits of video, calling Pelosi a "rock star" and more. They called her a gangster and set the slow-motion clip to hip hop. "The new poser suit for women. Red coat. Sunglasses. Nerves of steel," one woman tweeted. "NANCY PELOSI THROWS SHADE AT TRUMP THEN DONS SHADES)," a CNN chyron blared.

In that moment, Pelosi went from bogeymnan to icon. It was as if America, after years of fixation on her weaknesses, had suddenly woken up to her strengths. ... It was what she'd done. Her calm but forceful presidential comeback -- "please don't characterize the strength that I bring" -- resonated with every women who'd ever belittled in a meeting....

Returning to the Capitol, she marveled at the president's wall fixation. "It's like a manhood thing for him," she told her colleagues. She had tried, she said, to avoid stooping to his level, which she colorfully described as "a tinkle contest with a skunk." Instead, she said, "I was trying to be the mom" (p. 287).

Pelosi has said that the thing she is most proud of is passing the Affordable Care Act and the most serious thing she has ever done is impeaching the President. (No speaker has ever done this twice; no president, other than Trump, has ever been impeached twice.).

 

Let me end my review by highlighting one of Nancy Pelosi's lesser-known accomplishments. In one section of the book, Ball describes how Nancy Pelosi, in 1995, was able to save the Presidio of San Francisco. (The details are, in my opinion, less important than the results.)

All the wheeling and dealing finally bore fruit. The bill passed the Republican House in late 1995 and the Senate a year later. President Clinton signed it into law. As one writer marveled, Pelosi "had managed to get a Republican Congress to create the nation's most expensive national park in, of all places, Democratic San Francisco" (p 55).