To listen to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her quiet but firm pressure on President Biden to withdraw from the 2024 election was the simple result of the cold political calculations she has honed over decades on Capitol Hill.
“My goal is to defeat Donald Trump,” Pelosi, the former House speaker, said in a recent interview ahead of the release this week of a book about her work in Congress. “When you decide you're going to defeat somebody, every decision you make is driven by that goal. You can't gloss over it. What does it take to get to that goal? I knew I had to run a better campaign.”
The book, titled “The Art of Power,” features Pelosi reenacting key moments in which decisions were made during a range of events, including the Iraq War, the devastating financial crisis, the passage of Obamacare and her repeated clashes with former President Donald J. Trump.
But it was Pelosi's most recent, skillful display of statesmanship and power, which came long after the book was written, that may provide the definitive testament to her status as the Democratic Party's foremost force in recent decades: Her powerful display of enduring influence helped persuade a sitting president to forgo reelection, improving her party's chances of retaining the White House in November.
Pelosi has downplayed her role in pushing Biden aside and insisted the decision was hers alone. She said she was driven by a singular mission to defeat Trump as she focused on polls, fundraising and private conversations with the president and her shaken Democratic colleagues.
Pelosi said she did not initiate the calls with colleagues, seeking to dispel any allegations that she was plotting to oust Biden, a longtime ally. But her tactics and the personal outreach to Biden by congressional Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, may be among her most important actions if Democrats emerge victorious this fall despite facing a possible landslide defeat.
Pelosi and power have been inextricably linked in Washington for more than two decades, and her book seeks to document how she rose to power. Pelosi rose to the top at a time when men dominated Congress and confined women to a “marble ceiling,” a term she uses in honor of a common component of Congress that is much harder to shatter than glass. After losing a series of congressional elections to Republicans beginning in 1994, she ran for the party's No. 2 leadership position in 2001. She quickly encountered opposition from her male colleagues.
“The male members explained to me that there is a hierarchy in the House, that other male members had been dutifully waiting for senior leadership positions to open up, and that I was stepping in and upending the existing order,” Pelosi wrote.
She won that election and became the House's top Democrat a year later, a position she would hold until 2022. Like many of the most successful congressional leaders, Pelosi had no ambitions beyond the House and enjoyed the legislative process.
It came at a cost.
In a chapter titled “The Price of Leadership,” Pelosi recounts the horrific attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi, by a hammer-wielding assailant at their San Francisco home in 2022 and the feelings of guilt she felt.She also delivers harsh criticism of Trump, whom she has fought hard through two impeachments since their first meeting at the White House, when he confronted her about his false claim that he won the popular vote.
One of the book's notable revelations is a phone call that Trump initiated on the morning of September 24, 2019, just as Pelosi was about to announce an impeachment inquiry against Trump. Trump began the conversation pretending to discuss legislation, but Pelosi said the real purpose of the contact was to stop her from investigating a call in which Trump tried to convince Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rival, Biden, at the risk of losing U.S. aid approved by Congress.
“Throughout the call, which lasted more than 20 minutes, Mr Trump repeatedly said, 'It was the perfect call…. the call was absolutely perfect,'” Pelosi wrote, adding that Mr Trump ended the conversation by saying the truth would come out.
“I have had many conversations with this man,” she writes, “and at the end of almost every one of them I have thought: 'Either you are stupid or you think we are all stupid.'”
As speaker, Ms. Pelosi was known for her ability to muster enough votes to win on tough issues, using her intimate knowledge of members and their needs to assemble a slim 218 votes for a majority, with a few more in her pocket just to be sure.
“We're all in this party for a reason, but that doesn't mean we always vote Democrat,” she said in an interview about how she approaches her work. “Respecting differences. How do I shape this? How do I weave this tapestry? How do I navigate this kaleidoscope to get the numbers that we need?”
One example recounted in the book is the unforgettable day the House fell just short of the votes. On September 29, 2008, lawmakers failed to pass the bank bailout bill sought by the White House and congressional leaders, sending markets crashing and putting the economy at risk. An ominous split screen showed the vote count and chaos on Wall Street.
Pelosi says Republican leaders tried to pin the blame on her for not getting the votes they promised and for a speech in which she scolded the GOP for how it handled economic policy during the George W. Bush administration and its control of Congress. Pelosi denies that notion, noting that, unlike her, “they never had the votes to begin with.” The rescue package passed a few days later.
The book also touches on disappointments, such as the failure of the Senate to include a public insurance option in her proudest achievement, the Affordable Care Act, due to staunch opposition from the Senate (she frequently raged about the Senate's “bias” on the bill).
She also didn't mention the cost of her determination: in 2009, she pushed a climate change bill through the House of Representatives despite warnings from lawmakers of the grave political risks, only for it to be shelved in the Senate — a failure that was later blamed for the Democratic defeat in 2010 and her ouster as speaker.
Pelosi said that's a subject for another day and is off topic in a book about how she managed to accomplish what she did despite the deeply polarizing era in which she became a major political icon.
Her secret weapons, she said, were “knowledge, judgment and strategic thinking,” along with a reputation for being fearless in the face of opposition.
“You have to act,” Pelosi said. “If people know you're going to act, that's one thing. If people don't think you're going to act, then they start exercising their options and your power is diminished.”
She added: “People say to trust your gut, but unless your gut feeling is backed up by information, judgement and experience, and in the case of women, intuition, your gut feeling is useless.”
