The Daily - Nancy Pelosi’s Dilemma

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

Republicans in this year’s elections are casting one person as the symbol of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. Many Democrats are also turning on the same figure. Guest: Alexander Burns, who covers national politics for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Republicans in this year's midterms are using one person to represent everything that's wrong with the Democratic Party. As it turns out, many Democrats

are turning on the same figure. It's Friday, August 17th. Alex, last time we talked to you, it was on the eve of the special election in Ohio. was on the eve of the special election in Ohio. And you said the election there represented a test of whether the Republican strategy in the midterms would essentially be to run an opposition-only campaign. Vote for us because we're not the Democrats. And what have we learned since then?

Well, we learned that it worked just barely in Ohio. In politics, they call this tight as a tick. Take a look at these results last night in Ohio's 12th district. This is a special election for the House of Representatives to replace a retiring Republican representative. This was an election in a conservative part of the state, a district that President Trump carried by 11 points. The Republican candidate appears to have won there

by a little bit less than one percentage point. They're still counting and litigating some of those votes, but it was really a skin-of-their-teeth kind of victory. Alex Burns covers politics for The Times. And what Republicans took away from that is that the total war strategy is what it's going to take, and it very well might succeed at holding down their losses and holding the House. And what is that strategy actually looking like in the midterms? It's a very big country, so I imagine that it means running against Democrats differently from

district to district. They're definitely going to be important gradations regionally, depending on the nature of the district. In more rural areas where the president is stronger, you're going to see Republicans raising more issues like immigration, more issues like football players kneeling and support for the police. In more suburban areas where the president is less popular, where more educated Republicans are a little bit shakier on the party, you're going to see an equally negative campaign, but probably about some different issues, more about taxes, more about the Iran deal and national security. And there are going to be a couple issues that cross all time zones for Republicans. One of them is Nancy Pelosi. They're going to be bringing her up everywhere.

Well, what is that about? Why is she the thing that kind of unifies this strategy for Republicans? Well, she is one of the most unpopular politicians in the country, according to polling conducted by both parties and in every part of the United States. There's not a competitive congressional district where she is a popular character. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Republicans have run tens of millions of dollars over the years attacking her, branding her as this avatar of a radically liberal coastal elitist who looks down on the kind of voters who they're pursuing. Another disgusting portrayal of a female politician went viral. This one graphic depicting Nancy Pelosi as Miley Cyrus with her tongue out, bent over, before a flexing Jerry Brown. Even Democrats who see that as a wildly unfair caricature basically concede that the Republican campaign

has mostly worked. So she's sort of a shorthand for all the reasons why you don't want to let the Democrats take back power. That's certainly how they're trying to use her. But how does it actually work in the campaigns? How do you run a candidate in some district in, say, Ohio, not so much against his actual or her actual opponent, but against Nancy Pelosi? Well, what we saw in Ohio and what we saw in a couple of special elections before that,

voters would get these campaign mailers at their door that showed whoever the Democratic candidate was. And in Ohio was Danny O'Connor, this 31-year-old local official hanging like a marionette from strings held by Nancy Pelosi. After lying the whole campaign, dishonest Danny O'Connor now admits he'd vote for Pelosi. Pelosi's running for re-election. I would support whoever the Democratic Party. Thank you. Whoever the Democratic Party. Thank you. Dishonest Danny lied about Pelosi. Now he's lying about Social Security and Medicare. O'Connor supports a Pelosi-backed plan that cuts Medicare spending by $800 billion. You have seen in the past ads that would morph candidates' faces into Nancy Pelosi's face, and that's just the beginning. You're going to see this in virtually every competitive election around the country this

fall. Meet Washington insider Andy Kim. Pelosi supports Kim because Kim supports her liberal agenda. Andy Kim is a Pelosi liberal. He's not one of us. Sharice Davids supports a government takeover of health care that would nearly double the national debt. It's why Nancy Pelosi's allies have spent 700 grand backing Davids. Sharice Davids is a Pelosi liberal. Republicans just try to turn every individual House campaign into a referendum on who should lead the House overall, right? So that doesn't matter how much you might like Michael Barbaro or how appealing you might find his ads.

A vote for Michael is a vote for Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Brindisi's liberal agenda is too extreme for Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Brindisi's liberal agenda is too extreme for upstate New York. Under Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Brindisi, our economy crashed. Reckless spending, devastating unemployment,

higher taxes. Claudia Tenney is fighting for President Trump's agenda in Washington. Like a direct one-to-one. One-to-one. You're really just voting on who the Speaker of the House

is going to be. So Pelosi is to Republicans in this strategy what President Trump is to Democrats. In other words, they realize they need a counterweight boogeyman. That's right. And how are Democrats responding to this campaign against their party leader? For the most part, Democrats who are running in the toughest races are trying to distance

themselves from Nancy Pelosi. Congressman Hill opened his campaign by attacking me, knowing full well that I've said from day one that I won't vote for Nancy Pelosi. Congressman Hill opened his campaign by attacking me, knowing full well that I've said from day one that I won't vote for Nancy Pelosi. We're better than that. They're not necessarily saying negative things about her, but it's hard to find a Democrat running for Congress in a really competitive district who has expressed an intention to support her again, a desire to make her speaker again. A number of them have said they won't vote for her under any circumstances to try to blunt those Republican attacks. Paul Ryan is retiring, so Republicans will have a new leader. Democrats also need a fresh start. That's why I won't be voting for Nancy Pelosi for leader. Instead,

I'll push to find a new leadership team that ensures Congress works for all of us. Montanans deserve nothing less. More often what you hear is Democrats talking more vaguely about new leadership in Washington. They try to tie in change on their own side with the change that they're trying to bring to control of Washington overall. I grew up in a small town here in rural Ohio. The type of place where, you know, folks go to football games on Friday nights, people help each other out, people work really hard. But also it's full of a lot of folks who I think have been forgotten in some ways.

I think we need a change in leadership on both sides of the aisle. Paul Ryan's not doing anything for working families, but we need new leadership on the Democratic side of things too. We need a new generation of leadership. I'm Danny O'Connor, and I approve this message. So they're suggesting that it's time for her to perhaps not be the leader of the Democrats in the House. Some of them are going a good deal further than suggesting.

Some of them are saying pretty bluntly that it's time for her to go. There's even a block of Democrats in the House, mostly younger Democrats, who have come out and said that she should consider leaving before the election or stating that she won't seek the speakership again in order to take that whole issue off the table as an electoral tactic for Republicans. Among folks led by the congressman from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton. My positions on party leadership are very clear.

And I've been calling for our leaders to step down and to allow a new generation of leaders to step up and lead our party forward for a long time. Member of Congress from Long Island, Kathleen Rice. We need a winning strategy. And I think the first step to getting to a winning strategy is a change in leadership. Both younger, newer Democrats, there is this insistent argument that it could cost them control of the House to have an unpopular leader, or they could just end up sacrificing winnable seats that end up just out of reach because Republican voters mobilize against Nancy Pelosi. So Democrats might actually ask their own party leader to step down ahead of the midterms in the interest of kind of pulling out the rug from

underneath this Republican strategy. Do you think that that could actually work? Would it effectively destroy this kind of only plan that Republicans have for holding on? Republicans would be very, very disappointed to see that happen. The argument that these younger— If they get what they say, they sort of want it. If they—right. To vanquish Nancy Pelosi once and for all would be the worst thing that could happen for them in the next 80 or so days. Look, the argument that Seth Moulton makes is that it's going to be very, very difficult for her to become speaker again under any circumstances

because of the dissent she's facing on the Democratic side. So why not just step down before the election and disarm Republicans on that front early. So it sounds like there's more to the Democrats wanting Pelosi to step down than just Republicans using her as the boogeyman. Oh, certainly. Nancy Pelosi has been leading the Democratic caucus in the House since I was in high school. There are many, many members of the House who have never— We should say you're in your early 30s. I am in my early 30s.

Still early 30s. There are many members of the House who have never— We should say you're in your early 30s. I am in my early 30s. Still early 30s. There are many members of the House who have never served under another leader. And there are not just younger Democrats, but some Democrats in their middle-age years or even in the winter of their political lives who feel that they've not had the chance to step up because Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants have been in control for so long. So she is not just confronting Republican attacks. She is confronting just a level of exhaustion on her own side that is going to make it challenging for her to stay on top of that job. We're not winning.

And if this was a football coach or a baseball manager, we would be trading them in for someone new. And I'm asking the opportunity to do that myself. trading them in for someone new, and I'm asking the opportunity to do that myself. Is it also the case, though, that this is all kind of connected, that in order for Democrats to pull off their larger strategy beyond just taking back the House in the fall, that they need a different sort of leader to fulfill this vision of reclaiming, especially working class white voters, as you've told us, that they plan to do in their kind of step-by-step vision of taking back the House, then the Senate,

and then ultimately the White House. This is one of the big dilemmas confronting the party now, that on the one hand, it's really hard to see them enacting an agenda governing from the House in a way that appeals to the middle of the country when they have such a polarizing leader. On the other hand, it's very, very hard to see them governing from the House in an effective way unless they have a really, really skilled and forceful leader who knows how to command the chamber.

And that's Nancy Pelosi. She's the most effective leader in terms of results they've had in a generation. There's also nobody else in the party who is quite as polarizing as she is. results they've had in a generation. There's also nobody else in the party who is quite as polarizing as she is. What's the risk of a non-Pelosi, one of these insurgent, younger, less experienced figures becoming speaker? The risk is that this is a big, complicated job, and the stakes are incredibly high. And the Democratic Party is about to elect a whole bunch of candidates who have never served in Congress before. Many of them have never served in public office before. And showing them the ropes and building a cohesive Democratic party on the Hill is a really tough job. And the stakes for Democrats are extremely, extremely high.

Trump is a wily opponent. Democrats have not held power in that chamber for quite a while. And if they're going to use the power of the House to check the president, investigate the president, ultimately reclaim the presidency, they need somebody who understands the levers of power. There's a general recognition in the party that a younger, untested person is certainly a risk. They look at the Republican Party under Barack Obama as a cautionary tale that Republicans won the House in 2010 by a huge margin. They came in with many of the same aspirations to outflank the Democrats on policy, check a liberal president, defeat him, and they struggled badly to corral this Tea Party caucus that was just out of control in a lot of ways. And Democrats, it would seem, need someone who

has the kind of deftness to navigate the big tensions within the party right now, especially among those now seeking roles in the House, which are between, on the one hand, kind of identity, and the other, this kind of much more simple economic message. That's right. If the Democratic base is going to sit through two years or four years or eight years of messaging on the economy and public integrity and not a whole bunch of more incendiary issues that Democratic voters want to talk about. They are going to have an easier time hearing that by all reckoning from the first female speaker or the first black speaker than they would from an aging white guy.

So the question of identity that so many liberals care about needs to be contained in the actual identity of the next speaker, not necessarily in their politics. That's right. So I guess the big question is, how is Congresswoman Pelosi responding to this?

Well, when I spoke to her this week, she initially claimed to be totally unconcerned with all of the maneuvering around leadership. Except for the part where she talked to you. Except for the part where she talked to me. She has said in no uncertain terms that she intends to be speaker again. And she is deeply, deeply involved in the Democratic campaign. She's a powerful fundraiser. And when I spoke to her, she was in between events in Texas. She was doing six in one day. She said to me, and it was a new statement for her, that she's trying to build a bridge to a new generation of leadership, but that somebody has to show that there's something on the other

side of that bridge. Is the fact that she's even talking, though, about being a bridge, does that feel like some kind of acknowledgement that she understands what's happening? I don't know that there's another way to read it. That in the past, she has talked about a transfer of power as some distant, abstract event. That yes, of course, someday that will happen. This is much more concrete, where she's not just talking about building a bridge. She's talking about, you know, what the other side of that bridge has to look like, that you need to have somebody waiting in the wings, picking up the job who has demonstrated that they have, and these are the criteria that she laid out,

demonstrated that they have very significant support from their colleagues and from voters, that they have a vision for the country that people find appealing and that they can raise the money to help Democrats win. So what's your sense of how this is going to play out over the next couple of weeks in my talks? Well, over the next couple of weeks, you're going to have, you already have these insurgent Democrats in the House really lobbying candidates very, very hard to say publicly, loudly, in the most unambiguous terms, that they will not vote for her or even asking her to step aside. We'll see how much momentum that effort picks up. You could see it becoming a major feature of the campaign in September. You could also see it fizzling from

Democrats who just feel like they don't feel comfortable going there. And then we're just going to need to see what the results are on election day. If they win a really tiny majority after Republicans run this Pelosi-bashing campaign, it's probably going to be to see what the results are on election day. If they win a really tiny majority after Republicans run this Pelosi bashing campaign, it's probably going to be hard for her to become speaker again, that the votes probably just won't be there. If this turns into a blood election, if Democrats win, you know, not 24, but 34, 44, 54 seats, then they may well have the kind of muscular majority she needs to say, go ahead, two dozen of you don't want to vote for me, make my day. And so what happens to Pelosi if Republicans hold the House this fall? If Republicans come out on top of this campaign, especially after running this anti-Pelosi strategy, you're looking at not just her but the entire Democratic leadership probably having to step down.

That you have this team that's been in place for more than a decade. Democrats have lost more elections than they've won in that time. And the sense of urgency and disappointment, and I think it's probably not too strong to say despair at that point among Democrats, would just be untenable for the folks who have led the campaign. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. led the campaign. Thank you, Alex. Thank you.

Why not, if the Democrats take back the House, give up the gavel? I do not think our opponents should select the leaders of our party. The Republicans are spending millions, tens of millions of dollars against me because they're afraid of me, because I out-raise them in the political arena, because I outsmart them at the negotiating table, and because I'm a woman who is going to be a seat at that table. And that, for me, is very important. If Hillary Clinton had won and sat at the head of that table, it would be different. But I'm not yielding that. Now, I do believe that none of us is indispensable, but I think I'm the best person for the job, and I won't let the Republican ads,

which are just flooding these districts, and I say to the candidates, do whatever you have to do. Just win, baby. We must win this. Only then, after the election, will I ask people for their support. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. You're no good, heartbreaker On Thursday, the singer Aretha Franklin died of complications from cancer at the age of 76. I'll let you do these things to me

Everybody called Aretha Franklin the queen of soul because she was at the center of 1960s soul music. My colleague John Perelis has followed Franklin's career for decades as pop music critic for the times. Most of what Aretha Franklin sang were love songs, but they were love songs that talked about every area of love, from deep longing to indomitable strength. And I destroyed a lady that I toyed with love In a house that Jack built She came out of the gospel church, brought all that she had learned in the church

and all that she had learned from jazz and pop, put it into soul songs in the late 60s that define soul music for a generation. The first thing that strikes everybody about Aretha Franklin is her voice. But lesser known about her is that she was also an arranger, a musical architect. She walked in and sang all the parts, told the bands the groove to play, the guitar licks, the horn lines, the backup singers were all in her head. See what you're doing to me, you better think, think. You hear songs like Think, you hear songs like Chain of Fools.

And she's singing about relationships as pop singers do, as blues singers do, as soul singers do. But, you know, it's hard to tell if it's musicianship or confession. You're treating me badly. You're not respecting me. You're not giving me what I deserve, which is different from saying you're not giving me what I need, it's you're not giving me what I deserve. Respect was an Otis Redding song.

Aretha takes this song, comes in on the strangest note you would ever expect, completely revamps the rhythm, completely syncopates it, and it becomes the international anthem that we all love. Respect was a symbol of its time. Respect was a song that she very consciously, she told me in an interview, was thinking about. Respect for women, respect for civil rights. It was about the role of specifically a woman taking the song over from a man. And this was 1967. This was before the women's liberation movement of the 70s.

She was also singing at civil rights rallies for Martin Luther King, putting herself at the disposal of the cause. So this was a very strong statement for a woman to be making. I'm on my mind And all I'm asking In my time, honey Is to give me My promise When you get home

That's what Aretha Franklin brought to every song, was the ability to get to your deepest and most tender emotions and to understand them and turn them into a source of strength. You left me hanging in a real cold way Speak your name The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Streets-Konaracha,

Claire Tennisgetter, Paige Cowan, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Jessica Chung, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. Our engineer is Chris Wood. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. Special thanks to Sam Dolmick, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, Nina Patuk, and Mark Silver.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.