If Kamala Harris succeeds in being elected president, much credit will belong to Nancy Pelosi, who used her experience and authority (and empathy) to do what no one else could — to get Joe Biden to drop his presidential bid. Her low-key response to a question on morning television was considered by many to be the final straw that forced him out. “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” she said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short… He’s beloved, he’s respected, and people want him to make that decision.”
Pelosi got what she always wants — a path to a victory. She did it in the same way she has wielded so much power over the years: with careful listening and ruthless vote counting, a keen sense of what motivates her Democratic colleagues, an ability to persuade and negotiate, and an unsparing refusal to yield even when defeat seems inevitable. Her comments that morning highlighted what is often referred to as her “iron fist in a Gucci glove” approach.
In her new book The Art of Power (a cheeky jab at Trump’s The Art of the Deal?) we learn how Pelosi developed these skills and used the power they brought. Although the book is subtitled My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House this is no mere outline of her path from Californian housewife and mother of five to House speaker and, as such, second in the presidential line of succession. (She was elected speaker twice, for the four years 2007–11 and for another four years 2019–23; her only predecessor to hold the position twice was Sam Rayburn in the 1950s.)
Rather, this book is for political aficionados who love the dealings essential to enact any legislative agenda; for the policy wonks who appreciate legislative acumen and the ability to keep a political party as diverse as the Democratic Party united; and for those who will cheer on an instinct for political theatre and political survival. This is a leader who also ensured her fractious caucus members had food and drink to sustain them while they hashed out political agreements and a woman who knows how to make a fashion statement even while she’s delivering an eight-hour filibuster speech on immigration rights.
The Art of Power starts out with Pelosi’s description of the horrifying October 2022 break-in at her San Francisco home. In recent years Pelosi has become a lightning rod for conservative Republicans’ anger, as exemplified when rioters broke into the Capitol demanding “where is Nancy?” on 6 January 2001, the same words used by the intruder who attacked her husband Paul. In a chapter that highlights the price politicians and their families can pay for their public roles, Pelosi makes a plea for an end to political violence, physical and verbal.
The remaining chapters are taken up with Pelosi’s accounts of the political action around the issues close to her heart that have often generated controversy and opposition, including human rights in China and Tibet, HIV/AIDS and healthcare reform, and those — the global financial crisis, the US invasion of Iraq, the two impeachments of Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s post-Covid legislation — that arose during her time as speaker.
Pelosi has for decades been an outspoken critic of human rights abuses in China; in fact, human rights in Tibet and China book-end her political career. Although she never explains the genesis of this commitment, it is clear that the people she has met and helped along the way have reinforced her resolve.
After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, which came just two years after she entered Congress, Pelosi led a House resolution condemning the Chinese government’s actions. Human rights in China “are not an internal matter,” it said, but a concern for the whole world. She also sponsored a bill aimed at shielding Chinese students studying in the United States, but it was vetoed by then-president George H.W. Bush.
In 1991 she was part of a group of lawmakers who unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square proclaiming: “To Those Who Died for Democracy in China.” In more recent years she was among the first to sound the alarm about China’s predatory trade policies and efforts to prop up authoritarian regimes.
One of the last trips she made as speaker, in August 2022, was to Taiwan. This was seen by many, especially the Chinese government, as highly provocative but Pelosi says she was determined not to let president Xi Jinping isolate Taiwan and she saw the issue as a matter of conscience.
It is this hawkishly independent streak, and her insistence on “honouring our values,” that has put her at odds over China with every administration. She disagreed with Bush the elder over his concessions to Beijing and failure to protect Chinese students; with Bill Clinton when he delinked trade and human rights in 1994; with Bush the younger when he refused to impose diplomatic boycotts on the Olympic Games held in Beijing in 2008; and with Joe Biden when he tried to prevent her Taiwan trip.
Pelosi’s account of 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war against Iraq highlights how her willingness to speak out was enabled by her long tenure on the House intelligence committee. She was drawn to the committee — not an obvious choice for a new member of Congress — by a concern about nuclear threats, but then issues of terrorism took over and she became incensed by what she saw as the misuse of 9/11 as a rationale for the war on Iraq.
In October 2002 — with Republicans in control of the House, Democrats holding a single-seat majority in the Senate, and midterm elections looming — Pelosi led a rebellion against the Iraq war resolution negotiated with George H.W. Bush’s White House by Democratic minority leader Dick Gephardt. The resolution passed, but Pelosi, as Democratic whip, had managed to persuade 126 Democrats to vote against it.
The following month’s elections were unusual. Despite a Republican occupying the White House, House Republicans gained seats. Gephardt resigned his leadership post, saying Democrats need someone to put “our party back in the majority,” and Pelosi became the first woman to lead either party in Congress.
It took her time to achieve Gephardt’s wish, but in 2006 she oversaw a midterm election campaign that swept the Democrats into majorities in both chambers. She became the House’s first female speaker, sworn in surrounded by young children, including her own grandchildren.
Pelosi plays down the magnitude of this breakthrough. She instead spends considerable time outlining how she worked to assert her core values — diversity, expansion of the leadership team, open communication. For a speaker’s actions to be strategic, respected and timely, she explains, it is vital to know what members of the caucus are thinking. “I considered myself a weaver at the loom,” she writes. “Every member is an essential thread in the tapestry our caucus is weaving.”
For those interested in policy and politics, perhaps the meatiest section of The Art of Power is the section titled Meeting Domestic Challenges. Here, Pelosi outlines efforts to deal with the global financial crisis, which overlapped with the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, and healthcare reform. She makes it plain that she believes the GFC stemmed from the Bush administration’s regulatory failures and a lack of leadership from the White House; indeed, she claims that it was her phone call to Treasury secretary Hank Paulson that jolted Bush into action.
Her outline of the rushed and confused efforts to develop and enact the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, are frankly quite scary. The first attempt to get the enabling bill through the House failed on a 228–205 vote; it was one of the few times Pelosi lost a floor vote. Only sixty-five Republicans backed the plan despite pleas from Bush, and a significant number of Democrats also saw it as overly expensive. But the bill did pass a few days later and was signed into law on 3 October 2008.
In December, in the dying days of his presidency, Bush used his executive authority to declare that TARP funds could be spent on any program that Paulson deemed necessary to alleviate the crisis. Pelosi was further angered when the funds went primarily to stabilising banks, a move that ignored the act’s requirement for assistance to be given to homeowners facing foreclosure. Although she spends much less time discussing it, she obviously sees the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, one of the first bills Barack Obama signed into law, as the better rescue plan.
Few major bills have a neat, linear journey, but the legislative path of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) was among the most difficult, contested and knotty in recent times. Views clashed over the role of government, access to healthcare and abortion as a right, and how healthcare costs should be covered. Pelosi provides a long and detailed description of the process that delivered these important healthcare reforms. “I considered my role to be that of maestro,” she says.
But the tribulations of steering the legislation through Congress were as nothing compared with what followed: the need to deal with wholesale misinformation and disinformation about its effects, the problems in its implementation, and the endless Republican attempts to repeal the legislation and cut funding. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, says Pelosi, she might have retired from Congress; instead she stayed on, largely to protect the Affordable Care Act.
Pelosi undoubtedly deserves much credit for getting Obamacare enacted. But here I must add a personal caveat to my endorsement of this chapter: I think Pelosi does a disservice by failing to highlight the seminal work undertaken by the energy and commerce committee, its chairman Henry Waxman and his staff, and its chairman emeritus John Dingell.
My credentials for offering this (perhaps biased) opinion? I was in Washington DC during that exciting era and was a bit player in the efforts to get the Affordable Care Act written and enacted during my time at the Center for American Progress. I had previously worked on the energy and commerce committee, and during that period my husband Bruce Wolpe was on Waxman’s staff. (Indeed he later wrote a book, The Committee, about those legislative efforts.)
Of course, many readers will be attracted to this book to learn more of Pelosi’s view of Donald Trump. And it’s all there, delivered in what are, for the most part, surprisingly moderate tones. Early on, she writes about their first White House meeting with Trump, who informed her that he had won the popular vote (yes, it was an issue even then). “If we are going to work together, we must adhere to the facts,” she responded, and that set the tone for their meetings during his term in office.
Pelosi also tells the story of 6 January 2021 from her viewpoint. The House Democratic leadership team had prepared for this day — the day when Congress would certify the electoral college results — knowing that many Republicans would resist, state by state. But when the threat came it was from outside, with the invading rioters having selected her office as one of their prime targets. She was dragged from the speaker’s chair by Capitol police and taken to Fort McNair, with no time even to grab her phone.
Small wonder, then, that she wanted “a man we saw as deranged and unhinged and who was still president of the United States” to suffer consequences. Elsewhere she writes: “The theme of the Trump years might have been ‘I gave him every chance to work together and he gave me no choice but to impeach him’.” Which, in January 2021, she moved to do, for the second time.
Nancy Pelosi has not written a typical autobiography or even a feminist manifesto. What The Art of Power reveals is a woman who was not willing to endlessly wait her turn in Congress, nor to shy away from hard work. That capacity to buckle down became even more obvious when she assumed leadership positions. “A successful speaker can’t ever be surprised by anything,” she writes. (That’s clearly not a lesson the current Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, has learned as he struggles to get his caucus to pass legislation to avert a government shutdown.)
There can hardly be a more male-dominated bastion of power or a more male-dominated pecking order than party leadership positions in the House. But Pelosi took on these challenges confidently, without doubts and without faltering (or at least none that she admits to). She increased her power by being generous — by offering more positions and more diversity, by helping with fundraising and campaigning, and by mentoring. When she arrived in Congress in 1987 just twelve Democratic women sat in the House; today there are ninety-one. She also increased her power and influence by helping to enact (or, where necessary, thwart) the legislative agendas of four presidents. And she is pragmatic: while she clearly always knows who the enemy is, she also knows that tomorrow is another day.
Finally, as The Art of Power shows, she is capable both of shaping the narrative to her benefit and creating a little drama. Her sarcastic slow clap during Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address and her theatrical shredding of Trump’s 2020 State of the Union speech will live on as political memes long after her retirement from the Congress. •
The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House
By Nancy Pelosi | Simon & Schuster | $34.99 | 352 pages
