Throughline - Nancy Pelosi
Episode Date: April 11, 2019Nancy Pelosi is the highest-ranking woman in American politics. She made her first run for public office at 47 years old and went on to become Speaker of the House twice. How has she had such an endur...ing career, and where does her power lie? On this episode, we trace the rise of the Speaker.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Hey, I'm Ramteen Arablui.
I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah.
And on this episode of Throughline from NPR,
The Ballad of Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
and second in line for the presidency.
She's also one of the most polarizing figures in American politics today.
And depending on where you sit, she's either a villain or a brilliant politician.
But without a doubt, she is a political force.
For more than a decade, she's had a leadership role in the Democratic Party.
And even though she lost her speakership in 2011, she managed to get it back.
Something that's a rare political feat.
Earlier this year, she started her second run as Speaker of the House.
And within weeks, she was having a standoff with President Trump over the government shutdown.
We came in here in good faith, and we're entering into this kind of a discussion in the public view.
But it's not bad, Nancy. It's called transparency.
It's not transparency when we're not stipulating
to a set of facts.
She's become a foil to President Trump,
an enemy of the right.
And on the left, she's had to contend with
rebellions and maintain control and unity
over a party that's increasingly
divided. That Nancy Pelosi,
the one we see in the headlines all
the time, the one who stared down Trump
over the shutdown, she's kind of an enigma.
So we wanted to know, who is Nancy Pelosi?
And what made her the person we see today, one of the most powerful political figures
in America? So most of us know Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker of the House,
the representative from San Francisco.
But her story really starts in Baltimore.
Where she was born Nancy D'Alessandro,
into a family that lived and breathed politics.
Her father was the mayor of Baltimore,
also served in the House of Representatives.
Her brother was the mayor of Baltimore.
She grew up in a political Italian family. We are a very devoutly Catholic family, proud
of our Italian-American heritage, fiercely patriotic and staunchly democratic. And almost
everything she learned about politics, she literally learned at her father's knee. That's
Elaine Povich, senior correspondent for Stateline and author of Nancy Pelosi, a biography. She literally learned at her father's knee. That's Elaine Povich, senior correspondent
for Stateline and author of Nancy Pelosi, a biography. She says that what Pelosi learned
as a girl was a certain kind of old-fashioned machine politics. At its heart, it was a pretty
simple kind of transaction. Folks would come to the D'Alessandro home and in the front room,
little Nancy would sit with a file and the folks who would come would the D'Alessandro home and in the front room, little Nancy would sit with a file
and the folks who would come would ask for things. They needed the trash picked up in their
neighborhood. Somebody in their neighborhood wasn't doing well and needed help with a job or needed
help with food. And Mayor D'Alessandro would see what he could do to help. But their name was
recorded in what was called the favor file. And when election
time came, don't you know, they opened that favor file and looked to those people for whom they had
done favors to help out at election time. Everything was organized. You could count those votes. You
knew who would vote for you. But the D'Alessandro family didn't expect Nancy, their only daughter, to enter the family business, at least not as a candidate.
She went to college, got married, she had five children in six years, and moved to San Francisco.
Still, politics was in her blood, and she found ways to stay involved.
She was a wife and a mother, but she was also an organizer behind the scenes.
She stuffed envelopes, she had meetings at her house, she behind the scenes. She stuffed envelopes. She had meetings
at her house. She taught the children how to stuff envelopes. They went canvassing, and she
generally had a stroller or two with her and maybe one by the hand. So Nancy, whose last name was now
Pelosi, stayed involved in local politics and did a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that it takes to get people elected.
She knew how to keep things together, on track, organized,
just like she learned as a little girl.
And she was really good at raising money,
holding dinner parties that doubled as fundraisers for the Democratic Party in California.
And then, in 1987, as her kids were growing up and leaving home,
she was hand-selected and endorsed to take the congressional seat
of a longtime friend who was dying.
To many, it seemed like she was cutting in line.
As you can imagine, there were a lot of people who wanted that seat.
They thought she was just a wife and a mother and, you know, sort of a dilettante.
And she came and organized, and she eventually won that primary.
So at 47, Nancy Pelosi was elected to Congress for the first time.
And after her swearing in, she did something unusual.
She asked to make a speech on the floor of the House.
She was told in no uncertain terms, no.
No freshmen are allowed to speak.
That was back before everybody was allowed to speak.
You know, you were literally a backbencher.
You were supposed to sit in the back and watch for a few decades or so
until you were allowed to open your mouth.
And finally, she said, well, I'd just like to make a short speech.
And the Speaker of the House agreed.
Does the gentlewoman ask to address the House?
Yes.
Without objection, the gentlewoman from California is recognized.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. The leadership of the House...
And her first speech was about the AIDS crisis, which was affecting San Francisco at that time.
And now we must take the leadership, of course, in the crisis
of AIDS, and I look forward to working with you on that. But I just want to say one thing, Mr. Speaker.
And it was devastating to San Francisco,
and not a very popular topic in Washington or a lot of other places.
It was considered a plague on the gay community.
So right away, Nancy Pelosi made it clear
that she wasn't going to sit on the sidelines and wait her turn.
She was going to play the game the way she knew
how, the way her family played it, on her own terms. Coming up, how she went from freshman
congresswoman to House leadership. Okay, so Nancy Pelosi begins as just another member of Congress, one in 435.
But she spends the next decade leveraging the little power that she has.
She got a seat on the Appropriations Committee,
where deals are made and money is spent.
She uses that position to raise money and help her allies.
Because Pelosi's district is so safely Democratic,
she's able to spend much of the time she would have been spending fighting for re-election,
instead supporting others.
Money is the grease that makes the machine work.
So if you have money, you can turn the levers of politics.
You can make the power work.
You can have friends because you helped them and they will help you.
It's the favor file all over again.
If you go out and help someone raise money, and then you turn to them and say,
hey, I'd like your vote for speaker, it's very, very hard for them to say no.
And so by the early 2000s, all of her instincts and all of her skills accumulate at this point.
Pelosi launched a bid to become House Minority Whip, which is one of the most powerful positions in Congress.
Their job is to make sure that as many possible members of the party vote together.
By launching that bid, she made clear her ambitions for leadership
and for breaking a barrier.
She also understood that the women's movement was
continuing to grow in strength and in power.
So she sensed, I think, that the time was right for a woman to move into leadership.
And it was sort of like, why not her?
And she won.
Pelosi became House Minority Whip, beating out longtime rival Steny Hoyer.
She stood out for a lot of her left-leaning positions,
including her vocal opposition to the Iraq War.
The president has spoken in his speech the other night. He talked about
rebuilding Iraq's economy after our invasion. We have problems with our own economy. We must focus
on building our own economy before we work it out.
At the time, Pelosi was sort of the intellectual leader of the progressive left of the Democratic Party.
What I think has allowed her to remain and strengthen is that wing of the Democratic Party, the liberal progressive wing, has grown.
That's Sue Davis, congressional correspondent for NPR.
In 2007, Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House.
She got there by building up alliances, cashing in on favors, and of course, with some of the best fundraising skills in Democratic politics.
Plus, she had a thick skin.
Now I don't think that they would probably be stomached in our national political dialogue, but the way that she was attacked for her looks or her appearances. I mean, those kind of jokes she has sustained for decades. And I just think
she kind of, she brushes it off. I think you have to, you can't let it be about you. So I think she's
always shown an ability when she's gone into sort of the legislative arena, you know, she keeps notes. She definitely keeps receipts.
But someone who has been your legislative opponent one year
could be your ally the next.
Basically, she learned how to win in politics,
how to whip votes.
As far as I can think,
there's never been a time in her career,
and she was the whip before she was leader,
and she was leader before she was speaker.
So she's done all these facets of leadership that when the votes really mattered, when she had to come up with the votes to put up the numbers, I don't think there's ever been a situation where she failed.
You know, she's the kind of leader who is really tough, but she's also at the same time really nice.
And so you don't recognize when she's working you.
This is former Congresswoman Donna Edwards.
She came to Congress in 2008 after winning a special election,
an election in which Nancy Pelosi had supported Edwards' opponent.
So on her first day, she met with Pelosi.
And as you can imagine, it was probably awkward.
I had the one-on-one sit-down with her in her office,
where she gets to discuss your hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
As House Speaker, Pelosi had the power to assign members of Congress to committees.
And she wasn't shy about using that as a tool to get people on her side.
She asked me about what I wanted to do, and what I noticed is she was incredibly familiar with my background.
And so I remember saying I wanted to go on the Energy and Commerce Committee, right?
Freshman, I want to go on Energy and Commerce.
Coming in in the middle of a session when, of course, there are no seats available on Energy and Commerce. She said, well, you know, your district is having a lot of transportation
issues. You know, you're trying to get that Purple Line built. And she knew everything about
my district. And wouldn't it be great for you to be on the Transportation Committee?
And so, I mean, she had me sold. Committee assignments can be used as a reward or as a warning.
She doesn't like to pick fights in public with people,
but I do think she would call somebody into her office
and sit them down and look them in the eye and say,
you will never get a seat on the Judiciary Committee.
And then she leaves it on you to walk out of the office
and if you want to tell the press that I just told you
that you'll never be on the Judiciary Committee.
And she comes out looking okay. Yeah, you know, and there are people that will
say that that's not fair or that's an abuse of power. But I always say you have to remember that
party politics are team politics. And if you don't keep the team together, everything falls apart.
And so I think sometimes she sees her role as like you have to punish some players,
you have to lift up other players. And all of it is in the goal of like keeping them all on the same team at the same time.
So after learning how to use all the tools she has as speaker, Pelosi, just over two years into her tenure, was about to face her biggest challenge yet.
Kill Bob Brown! Kill Bob Brown!
I want to know if it's coming out of my paycheck. Yes or no?
In the summer of 2009, House Democratic leaders unveiled legislation on health care.
And it quickly became the subject of fierce debate.
Members of Congress are back home holding town hall meetings on the issue.
And in meeting after meeting, there's been a pattern of disruption.
I have a question for this young man.
Go sit down and we'll take care of it.
I have a question for this young man.
And I don't want the government to do it.
Opponents of change shouting at members of Congress so loud, at times, police are called in.
Let me tell you something. The American people don't want this to pass.
The Republicans don't want this to pass. There will be no Republican votes
for this bill.
It was a once-in-a-generation battle that seemed to divide the country.
One of the most far-reaching bills in modern American history hangs in the balance
this morning. And a handful of wavering Democrats will decide whether to vote for health care
reform or let the president's signature issue die on the House floor.
Even if Pelosi could find the votes among members of her own party, it seemed clear
that supporting healthcare reform was likely to come with serious consequences.
I think they were very clear-eyed at what this could do to their majorities.
They were looking at the same polling data everyone else was.
They were seeing town hall meetings all over this country where people were completely divided.
And I think Pelosi saw this bill and this policy as bigger than her majority, as bigger than her speakership.
Sue Davis says that at one meeting with her caucus, things got pretty contentious.
As they neared the final vote, many members were starting to get nervous.
So Pelosi got up and was like,
it is not your job to perpetuate your own self in Congress.
That's not why you're here.
You're here to advance policies that are going to help this country.
Essentially telling her own members,
yeah, some of you are going to lose because of this bill,
and we're still going to lose because of this bill, and we're
still going to do it. And if you think about that in terms of the cowardice of so much of our
politics, that is one of the boldest, bravest, brashest moves a leader with a very tenuous
majority could have done. After a year of debates, protests, and deal-making, Congress has passed a health care reform bill.
And with great pride that we tonight will make history for our country.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi gaveled down that bill about 11.15 p.m.,
passing it by the skin of its teeth.
We will be joining those who established Social Security,
Medicare, and now tonight, health care for all Americans.
The bill passed the House by just seven votes.
And even though in the next election, Pelosi lost her speakership and the Democrats lost their majority.
I think if you were to go and talk to any of those members who took that vote and lost
their races, they'd still tell you that it was the best vote they ever took.
Maybe more than anyone else, including President Obama, the passage of the Affordable Care
Act made Pelosi the face of health care reform.
And that made her a target.
Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars
on attack ads against her.
Once, Nancy Pelosi was safely confined
to liberal San Francisco.
Now, gorged on our taxpayer dollars,
Pelosi has grown into a power-hungry Goliath.
His name is Conor Lamb,
but in Washington, he'd be one of Nancy Pelosi's sheep.
He joined Pelosi in voting to take more of your money to fund sex study programs of San Francisco prostitutes.
I remember going out into districts campaigning in 2010, 2012, and I'd wake up in some hotel room and turn the television on, and then there would be this commercial.
It would have the face of this candidate and then it would just kind of mold like the exorcist into Nancy Pelosi's face and it was scary. I was like, what the heck am I looking at?
Attention! Sacrificio!
John Dennis? Nancy? I was like, what the heck am I looking at?
She has become a villain in the tale of divided government.
If you look at her fave, unfave ratings for a politician, she's deeply unpopular in this country by a significant number of people.
But I don't know how much of that is because of the things she's done on her own or how much her political opponents
have successfully defined her.
Despite all of those attacks,
Pelosi seemed to stay focused on the long game.
You have to take the long view,
and I've heard Nancy say this,
that you don't look at a victory
through the lens of what happens today.
You have to look at where it through the lens of what happens today.
You have to look at where it is 10 years down the line.
The rest of us think in snippets, but real leaders don't think like that.
Following that major defeat, after decades in office, Pelosi didn't give up on politics. She went back to doing what she was really good at, raising money.
She is one hell of a fundraiser.
And she has probably raised more money for the Democratic Party than almost anyone, certainly
as much as Bill and Hillary Clinton, and probably even more than Barack Obama, because a lot
of Obama's fundraising was for Obama himself.
Nobody comes even close.
This fundraising is key to Nancy Pelosi's power.
And it's one of the things that makes it hard to imagine anyone else taking her place.
She has managed to figure out how to raise an awful lot of money from an awful lot of people.
And Democrats who are in tough districts should understand the value of that.
We don't have anybody else in our party who can do that.
After Democrats took back the House in 2018, Pelosi was ready to claim the speakership again.
But not everyone in her party was excited about that idea,
including a group of 16 Democratic members of Congress
who represented a rising insurgency within the party.
They even wrote a letter opposing Pelosi.
Others, like incoming freshman representative from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
joined a protest at Pelosi's office to push her to faster action
on climate change. I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single
one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we
save our planet, our generation. It was clear there were a lot of factions within the party,
and it wouldn't be easy to unify them all.
Just like with Donna Edwards,
Pelosi asked for a meeting with Ocasio-Cortez after she'd won her race.
If I were a fly on the wall, I would say it probably went something like,
congratulations, Alexandria,
for winning this seat. This is great. It was time for new blood and you did that. Congratulations.
Now, what do you need? For some, Pelosi did what she always did, offer them something in return
for their support. But other Democrats still thought she'd been in leadership too long.
So she also had to make another commitment.
She promised to only serve two terms as speaker because people felt she was too old at 78 to do it for long.
And four years from now, we'll see.
This might be the final question Pelosi has to answer.
When is the right time to step aside and pass the reins on to someone else.
This is something about her that I think will be debated for when she's long gone from politics,
is did she stay too long?
Should she have left?
She has had a not insignificant
and potentially growing number of Democrats in the House
who are eager for her to exit gracefully.
You know, there was an expectation when they lost the majority that she would bow out.
Pelosi allies would argue that there is a part of her that would like to leave.
No one was ready to step up.
And that leaving would leave a leadership vacuum that would leave the party worse than if she stayed.
That is certainly Pelosi ally arguments. I think there are Pelosi critics who would say
no new generation can rise as long as you stay
because nobody wants to look like they are positioning
or maneuvering or trying to take out
the first woman Speaker of the House
and that it would be healthy for the party
if she were to exit and let them fight it out.
That's it for this week's show.
I'm Randa Bedfatta.
I'm Ramtin Arablui.
And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.
This episode was produced by Ramtin and me.
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