Molly Ball, the national political correspondent for TIME magazine, has spent years covering Nancy Pelosi. Her new book "Pelosi," a New York Times bestseller and recommended by The Washington Post as one of "20 Books to Read This Summer," tracks Speaker Pelosi's eventful life from being a stay-at-home mother of five to becoming the most powerful Democrat in America today.
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has earned a place in history, not only as the first woman to take on the role, but as one of the most effective. Molly Ball's new book "Pelosi," a New York Times bestseller and recommended by The Washington Post as one of "20 Books to Read This Summer," tracks Speaker Pelosi's eventful life from being a stay-at-home mother of five to becoming the most powerful Democrat in America today.
Molly Ball serves as the national political correspondent for TIME magazine and has spent years covering Nancy Pelosi.
Signed copies of "Pelosi" are available to purchase from The Store at LBJ.
[Podcast introduction with theme music in the background]
President Lyndon Baines Johnson: So it's all here, the story of our time—with the bark off.
Mark Updegrove: That was President Lyndon Baines Johnson upon the dedication of his presidential library in 1971. Since then, the library has played host to the biggest names and best minds of our day, who have helped to tell the story of our times through candid, revealing conversations—with the bark off.
This podcast delivers them straight to you. Welcome to “With the Bark Off.” I'm Mark Updegrove.
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has earned a place in history. Not only as the first woman to take on the role, but as one of the most effective. Here she is in an interview I did with her last October in which she talked about her call to public service and her eventual rise to the speakership.
Speaker Pelosi: My motivation for even being in public life, comes from my family that public service is a noble calling. I wasn’t elected speaker because I was a woman. I had to prove that I would be the best for the job. Uh, but when the, uh, opportunity came, I was ready.
Mark Updegrove: Molly Ball, the national political correspondent for TIME magazine, has spent years covering Nancy Pelosi. Her new book, “Pelosi,” currently on The New York Times bestseller list takes a look at Speaker Pelosi and how she went from being a stay at home mother of five to becoming the most powerful Democrat in America today.
[Slow fade of theme music. Conversation begins.]
Mark Updegrove: Molly Ball, welcome to "With the Bark Off." We're so happy to have you here today.
Molly Ball: Thanks, so much for having me. Great to be here.
Mark Updegrove: So let me start, before we jump into your, your wonderful book on our house speaker, I just want to ask you, given the shelter at home policy that's in place in the Washington, D.C. area, how do you do your job as the national political correspondent for TIME magazine?
Molly Ball: You know, I think like everyone, I'm just trying to figure that out. Uh, I have a family also, so I don't want to expose them to danger. And I think that means that even if I were willing to expose myself, uh, I would be worried about them. So, and some things aren't that different. Uh, you make calls as a reporter, you talk to people, you try to get as much information from as many sources as possible, reading and researching and so on. But, uh, the kind of feature writing I do, I like to go and see things in person. So that's hard. I did, uh, our, uh, cover story on the, uh, nation's governors. I went up to Annapolis and spent some time with Governor Larry Hogan a few weeks ago at an appropriate distance, of course. Uh, and that was very enlightening. And so, uh, but I haven't been on a plane yet and I, and I'm, I'm not sure exactly how we're going to go forward, especially with an election on the horizon.
Mark Updegrove: Does it fundamentally change your ability to cover that election?
Molly Ball: Well, it fundamentally changes the election, also, right? Uh, there aren't any campaign rallies to go to; there's not any Joe Biden meet and greets, uh, or anything like that. So, the fact that the election itself is sort of being held virtually means that covering it virtually kind of makes sense. Uh, and it's uncharted territory for everybody. It's uncharted territory for the parties trying to plan their conventions. It's uncharted territory for the candidates trying to figure out how to reach their supporters. So, I think like with any news event, uh, you just kind of try to figure out what's happening in the moment and uh, hope that, uh, you can look back and say you captured it.
Mark Updegrove: Well, let's talk about your book on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Uh, uh, uh, Nancy Pelosi is a Congresswoman from California, but she's very much as you make clear in your book a product of Baltimore, Maryland. How did her childhood shape her?
Molly Ball: Well, clearly growing up in a political family and then going into the family business, she learned some things about politics. And as you said, uh, the political milieu she came from was the sort of old school, urban democratic, ethnic machine politics of Baltimore in the 1940s and 50s. So, that clearly informed her sense of politics, how it works, and the fact that her father was the mayor for most of her childhood. That's the kind of position that puts you in very close touch with your constituents, right? It's not like being a senator and being in Washington most of the time. You're really up close and personal with people. Uh, but I read a lot in the book, not only about Nancy Pelosi's father, who was a congressman and mayor of Baltimore, uh, and about her mother, who she always takes pains to emphasize was a big part of the political operations, was very much a family enterprise.
Uh, but her mother I think has been overlooked. Uh, understandably, she didn't have the title in front of her name. Uh, but I think her mother was just as responsible for shaping Nancy Pelosi's worldview and her personality and all of that. And her mother by all accounts is a very, uh, strong willed person, a sort of fiery, uh, no nonsense woman who not only did she run portions of the political operation, she was a sort of strategist for her husband. She ran the Baltimore Women's Democratic Club out of the basement, which was crucial to turning out the vote in those elections. Uh, and she ran the constituent services operation out of the family parlor, the so-called favor file where people could come in and get help with things, whether it was that they needed a job, needed to get on the welfare rolls, needed to get into the hospital or a housing project.
And uh, so Nancy Pelosi's mother was mostly in charge of that and from the time she was 11, uh, a young Nancy D'Alesandro was also a part of that. Uh, so, you know, I don't want to give her family too much credit honestly, because I think she is, uh, like all of us, a combination of, of self-creation and, and the circumstances she came from. And it's always, I think she doesn't get enough credit for that because she went into the family business. There is a tendency to attribute everything to that and not see the differences there, but she's also very much the, the San Francisco liberal she's always accused of being, um, and the product of, of her adult experiences. Um, but, but a, a friend and mentor of hers, Jack Murtha, always used to say, don't think she's from San Francisco—she's from Baltimore. And I think that's very much true.
Mark Updegrove: Well, you write in the book of her mother “as Nancy grew up watching her mother clash with her father as she struggled to make her own life. She decided that ‘Big Nancy,’ her mother, had been born 50 years too soon. Behind every great man people always said was a great woman and that was Big Nancy's place—behind.” So why did Nancy Pelosi, as a 23-year-old, accept that same place when she married Paul Pelosi in 1963?
Molly Ball: Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum, isn't it? I mean, I think she would say that she fell in love like a lot of people do and made decisions on that basis. Uh, she also always kept open the door to having a career outside the home, even as she was getting married right out of college, having five children in six years, being a obviously very busy housewife, uh, running, uh, running that household. Uh, but you know, she, she had taken the, the LSAT when she was graduating from college and for a long time, still thought she might go to law school and she was always active in politics as a young wife and mother, uh, not active in the sort of protest movements of the, of the sixties and seventies at that time, uh, but she was always active in democratic politics, having been literally born into the Democratic Party. She, she talks about, you know, pushing the stroller around, uh, Midtown Manhattan where they lived in those early years and sticking democratic leaflets under apartment doors. So she was, she was always active in, in causes and that eventually evolved into her becoming a fundraiser and strategist and then going into politics herself.
Mark Updegrove: So how does this mother of five enter into politics, actually throw her hat in the ring at age 47?
Molly Ball: Yeah. Well, she always says she never intended to go into elective office. And I was a little bit dubious about this claim of hers since she has risen so far in her career and, and has such a background in it. But I'm, but there's really a lot of instances in, in the course of her life where she said "no" to the idea of running for office, uh, as she was raising her children, increasingly becoming a, a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party, not just in California, but nationally. Uh, very active political volunteer ended up chairing the California Democratic Party, the largest democratic party in the country. And, uh, was largely responsible for bringing the '84 convention to San Francisco and made her own failed run, uh, for DNC chair. So she'd already, uh, risen to the sort of upper echelons of the democratic establishment, but frequently when people would ask her, uh, to run for office or, or, or tell her she'd be good for it, and she said "no," she thought that she was, was best suited to the, the behind scenes role.
And then in 1987, her good friend, Sala Burton, the widow of the, uh, California Congressman Phillip Burton, uh, was dying of cancer and called her, to her bedside, called Nancy Pelosi to her bedside. And it's the kind of dramatic scene that you would think was made up, but there are many witnesses to it. Uh, and she called her to her bedside and said, "Nancy, you must promise me that you will run for this seat, uh, when I'm not here anymore." And she said, "Oh, you're going to get better. I don't want it..."et cetera. But her friend extracted this deathbed promise, and so, uh, when not very long later, uh, Sala Burton did pass away, uh, she kept her promise to her friend and entered into a very crowded democratic primary, uh, in a special election for that, uh, that congressional seat representing San Francisco.
Mark Updegrove: So, Sala Burton imploring her to run for her seat is uh almost a cinematic scene as you suggest. Uh, so it's one thing to be asked to run, it's another thing to win the nomination and then the seat in Congress. How does that happen?
Molly Ball: Well, one thing that you will quickly learn from observing Nancy Pelosi is that she doesn't do anything halfway. I'm not going to say yes to something and then just kind of, you know, half- ass it and figure it doesn't matter anyway. She does everything to the maximum. And, and she, uh, modeled her campaign operation on what she'd seen from her father growing up, uh, that sort of ground level precinct by precinct, block by block, uh, relentless canvassing. The other thing about Nancy Pelosi is that she has just incredible levels of energy and doesn't sleep very much. So, she was just a relentless campaigner. She knew a lot of people in democratic politics from her history as a volunteer. She had coordinated all of the volunteers who staffed the '84 convention. They were a big source of support. Uh, so she had a very formidable opposition, there were 13 other candidates, four of whom were members of the San Francisco board of supervisors. She's a first time, uh, candidate, uh, but uh, you know, she just, she outworked everybody. She had her, uh Italian mother-in-law run a “nonna brigade” where they found 8,000, uh, women with Italian last names in the San Francisco phone book and called every one of them, told them to vote for Nancy Pelosi. Uh, so she was, she was creative, she was hardworking, and she had a lot of money. That's the other thing. She and her husband by that time were already quite wealthy and she was a fundraiser. So, she was able to raise and spend a lot of money. She spent a million dollars, which was a huge amount spent on a congressional campaign in those days. In fact, she outspent the rest of the field combined and was able to put up billboards and television ads, which, uh, again was pretty uncommon for a congressional campaign in those days.
Mark Updegrove: I want to get back to her career trajectory in a moment, which is itself a remarkable story. But you mentioned her energy. Uh, and your book makes clear that Nancy Pelosi is indefatigable. What makes her tick?
Molly Ball: You know, she is very driven. And she would say that she's driven by her mission to improve the lives of America's children. And, uh, she just, but, but some, it's just a natural characteristic that she has this incredible energy. You know, she talks a lot about how, uh, motherhood shaped her energy level, and I have personal experience with that with the way, you know, having a newborn, uh, makes you aware of, you know, a level of sleeplessness you hadn't previously thought possible. Uh, but it's clear that some of it is just, it's just sort of natural to the way that she's made. And I've, I've asked her, many people have asked her, uh, where, where do you get the energy? How are you able to do this? She is almost twice my age and she, every time I've been with her sort of wears me out. Uh, and, but, she'll just give you a completely blank look and, and sort of innocently say, “well, I'm Italian. We have great stamina.” [laughter] So that's her explanation.
Mark Updegrove: She had seen her father in Congress. Uh, but what did she look like as uh, uh, a relatively new congresswoman in Washington D.C.?
Molly Ball: Yeah, so she gets to Washington DC, she's 47 years old. She's a rich lady with a lot of connections. Uh, and I think the tendency was not to take her seriously, to assume that she was sort of a lightweight. Her, her, opponent in the campaign actually had called her a dilettante in his ads. Uh, so she really had to prove that she was a serious person, uh, who was there to really make a difference, not just to, to, to fill a seat. And uh, she did that in her trademark way. She just, she worked very hard; she put her nose to the grindstone. Uh, her brother, her older brother by that point, had already come and gone as the mayor of Baltimore himself, and he was a close advisor to her and something that he told her was, "if you know your stuff, it's very hard for them to dismiss you."
So, she just really immersed herself in policy. She focused not on climbing the leadership ladder, that wouldn't come for another decade, she focused on getting on the most important committees that did the most important work, chiefly the Appropriations Committee, which she, uh, was elected to on her second try. And, uh, then later also the Intelligence Committee, Banking Committee, Ethics Committee, and others. Uh, but she just became really conversant in the nitty gritty. She could recite to you the details of the federal budget, you know, that runs to hundreds of pages. She could tell you about the ins and outs of, you know, Medicare reimbursements or, or whatever else. And so, and as I note in the book, I think that a lot of women who are seeking, uh, important positions tend to over prepare in this way because they're not necessarily going to be automatically taken seriously when they walk into a room. Uh, I think you see this in, in Hillary Clinton as well, for example. Uh, and so that just level of preparedness, level of knowledgeability and then, uh, you know, her, her, uh, steeliness, her toughness is legendary today. Uh, but, but back in those days, that was another thing that I think impressed people. She was always willing to stand up to, uh, the, the men all around her and, and tell them when she thought that they were wrong. And, uh, eventually they realized that maybe she was right.
Mark Updegrove: Molly, what, what, what were the clear manifestations, uh, uh, what were the clear challenges that she had as a woman, as she was ascending the ranks in Congress in the late 1980s and in the 1990s?
Molly Ball: Well, first of all, she just didn't have a lot of company. Right? When she got to the house in 1987, out of 435 members, there were 23 women, including her. So, she wasn't going to have a very large friend base if she stuck to the ladies’ caucus, right? Uh, and now, and that was a big challenge, but one that, uh, you know, she decided early on that if the men around her were clueless or chauvinist, she wasn't going to focus on educating them. She was going to focus on winning them over so that she could do the important work she wanted to do. So making connections with people like Jack Murtha who was a conservative, uh, sort of gruff and she would even describe him as chauvinist ex-Marine, uh, defense hawk who was head of the, uh, the Defense Spending Subcommittee, and, and, and by impressing herself on, on men like that as a serious person, Murtha served as a sort of crucial validator for her with a lot of the other men of his demographic in the, in the democratic caucus. But you know, this was a day, this was a day and age when there was no lady’s bathroom anywhere near the house floor. Women were not allowed to wear pants on the floor of the House or Senate. Uh, so a lot ...and most of the women who did get to Congress got there because, uh, they were replacing their dead husband. So, it, it was a real novelty for women to even be there, much less to want to have a voice. And, uh, the only way she, she could see to attack that was just to prove herself over and over again.
Mark Updegrove: And she eventually blazes a trail to the Speaker seat. How does that happen?
Molly Ball: Well, after she'd been in Congress for a decade and done important work on, on those committees, important work on issues like AIDS and human rights in China, uh, by 1998, there was a potential for an opening in the top leadership if the Democrats were able to win back the majority. Right? This is after the '94 Republican revolution, so they've been in the minority for a little while, which is not a lot of fun, uh, in Congress. And um, and so based on that potential for a leadership spot to open up, she starts a campaign, starts amassing allies and sending letters and letting people know that she wants to run for Whip if there's a vacancy. Uh, but they didn't win the majority in '98, so there was no vacancy, but she kept campaigning. They didn't win again in 2000, so there was no vacancy and she kept campaigning and she was very frustrated. I think a lot of Democrats were. But for her especially, she felt like the lead... the party leadership was, was complacent and stuck in their old ways and she wanted to show them how to run a modern campaign and, and sort of, and, and show them what it took to win. Uh, there's a point where she, she walked out of a strategy meeting with the democratic caucus where no one seemed to be listening to her pleas to update the campaign strategy, and she turns to her, her friend, the former Congressman George Miller, and she says, "George, I don't think these men know how to win." So it was, so that was a big part of her pitch, right, was I can get us back to the majority. I know how to win. And she had a track record of racking up wins in California. But it's also significant that when she did seek a leadership post, it was one of the top posts.
This is the number two post in the minority caucus, number three in the majority—the Whip position. She'd previously, uh, been offered lower positions, such as the, the head of the campaign committee, but she didn't want to be pigeonholed as only a fundraiser, as only a sort of political strategist. She wanted to be part of the, the, the serious legislative business of the House. So, she... but a woman had never been Whip before, uh, a woman had never achieved a position in the caucus, higher than secretary. In fact, another place where women were often sort of relegated to, and uh, so it took a lot of gumption on her part, but, uh, finally the election...the post finally did open up and after three years of campaigning against her, her rival then announced, Steny Hoyer, an election was finally held in October, 2001. And, uh, by a significant but not enormous margin, uh, she won that leadership race, became the Whip, shortly, became, uh, the Democrats 'minority leader. And then in 2007, the Speaker.
Mark Updegrove: She is not braggadocious, but she does credit herself as being "master legislator." What makes her so good?
Molly Ball: A lot of things, and I've thought a lot about this obviously, uh, but you know, the House is an incredibly complex place. It's, uh, no disrespect to the Senate and, uh, those who have, uh, mastered it. You've got 435 members, all of them have shifting loyalties, different prerogatives. You've got to know not just who all of them are, which I can't even keep their faces straight, but where they, what their district is, what issues they're interested in, what committees they want to get on, what caucuses they're a part of, what grudges they nurse deep down, all of that. And so, she has a prodigious memory for that level of detail. She's really good at just understanding, uh, what it is that each member wants and, and, and what, uh, and how she can position whatever she's doing to get their favor. Uh, and, and she's a tremendously good negotiator as well. And, uh, I, I love sort of cataloging some of the negotiating tactics that I feel like you can see over the course of her career. Things like, uh, the, the, the false concession, right? Pretending you're giving something up to the other side of negotiations when actually it didn't matter to you anyway, or, or in fact you'd already decided, uh, to give it up, things like that. But more than any particular tactic, I came to realize that it was just an incredible instinctive understanding of human nature. And I think, again, I think motherhood is part of this as well. Politicians like toddlers are, uh, unreasonable egomaniacs [laughter], and she had five of them. And, and, and so that's, that itself is a kind of caucus, right? Constantly shifting alliances and rivalries and, and so on. And you've got to get them all pointed in the same direction.
And that, that unity is essential if you're going to get anything done with kids. Sometimes getting something done is just getting everybody out of the house at once. Right? And so I think that incredible understanding of human nature and human motivation is the sort of baseline skill that enables her, uh, to, to, to run the House, to run the caucus, you know, she, more than any other, uh, legis...congressional leader in history has enforced incredibly high levels of party discipline and that may be a reflection of the very partisan age that she has sort of come of age in as a politician. But I think it's also, uh, a strength of hers that because she is so good at, a, getting her caucus to row in the same direction that gives her a lot of leverage to negotiate with the other side. She, unique among congressional leaders, she can go into a negotiation and say yes or no to things because she knows what she can get her caucus to support. She doesn't have to go back to them to see if she can get them to vote for it. She just knows where they are and, and what she can reasonably get for them.
Mark Updegrove: She had a surprisingly productive relationship with President George W. Bush, uh, talk about that relationship and, and what came out of it.
Molly Ball: It really prefigures her position now because she was up against a, a Republican Administration, uh, that was increasingly unpopular and a president who was absolutely loathed by the Democratic Party. Uh, but she wasn't going to let that be an obstacle to the things that Congress needs to do: whether it's passing a budget, or rescuing the economy, or whatever else. So, you know, the Democrats won the majority in 2006, largely because of the public's fatigue with the Iraq War. And so she believes she had a mandate to try to curtail the war, which she was ultimately unable to do, but, but she also believed it was important to put that issue aside and find areas of agreement with the administration wherever possible to work on a bipartisan basis. And that was a, that was caused a lot of displeasure on her left flank. She had protests in her yard in San Francisco constantly from, uh, Code Pink and other antiwar activists who were incensed she wouldn't impeach President Bush. And she... so similar to now, right? She had pressure on the right and pressure on the left and she believed it was important to stand up for liberal values, but also to get things, get as much done as possible within the circumstances she was given. So, I think it's very similar to the approach that, that she's taken with Trump.
Mark Updegrove: How would you characterize her relationship with Barack Obama?
Molly Ball: They had a very good relationship and they; they like and admire each other very much. They had a difficult partnership in a lot of the time he was in office, as I detail in the book. It was a common theme in the Obama Administration that the Democrats in Congress never felt like he paid enough attention to them, didn't spend a lot of time on the Hill, and it, it was part of his public image that he was somewhat detached, right? From the sort of proceedings in Washington because he had run against uh, this sort of idea of toxic Washington gridlock, uh, so he kept himself in a little bit of a remove, uh, which I think the, those, uh, the, the people involved in that said, toxic Washington gridlock resented a little bit. Uh, so then there are various times when Pelosi, like many Democrats was frustrated with Obama’s, uh, negotiating ability with his, uh, willingness to reach across the aisle, try and get Republicans to support things unsuccessfully over and over. And so, uh, you know, I think, I think had, had she been in charge, so she would have pushed to go further in a lot of respects, uh, and, and push to drive a harder bargain with the other side. Uh, but that's, so, so I think that, you know, there was a, there were a lot of frustrations, particularly after 2010 when she was relegated to the minority, but, uh, but, but they, like, they, they've always liked and admired each other very much.
Mark Updegrove: So, Molly, how does her mastery of the legislative process come into play in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which is Barack Obama's signature legislative achievement?
Molly Ball: And it is hers as well, right? She has said....
Mark Updegrove: Sure.
Molly Ball:…repeatedly that she, she wants that to be her legacy. Uh, you know, I don't think it would have gotten done without her for many reasons. She got it through the House, not once, but twice with nary a vote to spare. Uh, but also, you know, she was a big part of insisting that this had to be done at a time when a lot of Democrats, including a lot of Obama's political advisers thought, you know, we, we're still dealing with an economic collapse. Do we really want to try to also get universal healthcare in the middle of this crisis? Should this really be our top priority? And she was with Obama in believing that, that this was an opportunity for generational change and that they should not pass it up. So that was important at the outset, and then, and then midway through the process when the Democrats lost their 60th vote in the Senate and it was clear that they weren't going to get any Republican support, uh, again, a lot of Obama's political advisors thought it was time to, to walk away. That they, they've gone as far as they could, uh, but they just weren't going to be able to get over the finish line. And anyway, it was politically toxic, so it would be, they'd be better off not doing it anyway. And there was a climactic meeting in the Oval Office where she addressed the president directly and she said, I love the word she used too. She has such a unique vocabulary. She said, "Mr. President, I know some are urging you to take the namby pamby approach [laughter]." And she proceeded to argue that if he would keep pushing, she would make it happen in the House and they could still get healthcare across the finish line and, uh, Obama took her side and the rest is history, but she was a really crucial part of steeling his spine and making him believe that this was still possible when, when things were at their absolute bleakest.
Mark Updegrove: Despite being a reputable former Speaker of the House of Representatives, you write, of Nancy Pelosi in 2018, "for years, pundits, the press and even some members of her own party had treated her as little more than an inconvenience. They fretted about her age and her polarizing political persona even after she helped engineer a landslide victory in the November 2018 midterm elections, the grumbling continued, and some Democrats tried to deny her the speakership."
It's a very powerful part of the book and yet she wins. So how does she claw her way back to become the Speaker of the House once again?
Molly Ball: It was a real battle. Uh, after the midterms in 2018 and uh, and I think it also gave her the opportunity to demonstrate exactly the skills that qualify her for the position, right? Because she had to win over almost every member of the Democratic Caucus. She could lose less than 10 percent in order to get the votes for Speaker on the floor of the House. And many of these candidates had run against her, essentially had, had, had run in conservative districts on a promise not to vote for her because she is so polarizing and so toxic in a lot of conservative areas of the country. Uh, and uh, even those Democrats who hadn't distanced themselves from her had been pelted with a barrage of, you know, tens of millions of dollars in Republican attack ads with Nancy Pelosi's face in them. Uh, so she had to fight very hard to get everybody, and you know, there were, there were those on the left who were dubious about her because, because of her desire for compromise and bipartisanship at times. And there are those on the, on the right most edge of the caucus, the, the moderates and the so-called problem solvers who don't, who didn't like her images of, you know, partisan San Francisco liberal. So, you know, it was by again, hard work and wheeling and dealing and knowing exactly where the pressure points were that she was able to assemble that majority back on her side. And you know, she was relentless and calling people and having meetings with people and asking, making people tell them what it would take to get their support. This is another of her negotiating tactics I've learned is the sort of name your price where she, she gets you to, uh, to say, well, okay, I'll give you what you want, but only if you do this impossible thing.
And then she does the impossible things, so you have to give it to her. Uh, and so, so she is constantly meeting with the recalcitrant members of the caucus, negotiating with them, bargaining with them, and there's an implicit threat as well, right? There's the carrot and the stick because everyone in the House Democratic Caucus knows you don't want to be stuck on Nancy Pelosi's bad side. It is not a good place to be. So, uh, so through a combination of all of these tactics with members individually, one on one with, with these different caucuses that she was negotiating with, she finally was able to get back to 218 and then there's that climactic moment that sealed the deal, which is the moment that is pictured on the cover of my book where she had that meeting in the White House with Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer that was unexpectedly caught on tape when the president decided that he would invite the, the press to, to film the proceedings instead of having a negotiation behind closed doors to try to prevent the government shutdown. And that was the meeting where Trump tried to, you know, insult and dismiss her by saying, well, Nancy is in a position where she can't really talk right now. She's got this tough battle of, you know, of her caucus and, uh, Nancy Pelosi who has never hesitated to, to interrupt men, if she has to, to set them straight. She says, "Mr. President, please don't characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats who have just won a big victory." And so, it was at that moment that you first started to see sort of Twitter light up, right? With all of these people saying, oh my gosh, she just gave it to him, right? Right to his face, right in person. And I think that resonated with a lot of people, particularly women. Um, and then when she walked out of that meeting and put on that red coat and put on the sunglasses and had that sort of self-satisfied little smile on her face, that image launched a thousand meetings because it was just such a perfect, you know, she's so put together, so poised, so, uh, so collected in the face of, you know, Trump and, and the, and the chaos and, and, and, and everything he represents. And so, I think, uh, from that moment on, it was clear that the tide has turned in her favor and it was going to be very hard to, to keep her out of that position.
Mark Updegrove: I'm going to go back to the speakership for just one moment and her securing it again in 2019. Despite the fact that, that she had been the first woman to become Speaker of the House, how much of that adversity was a result of her gender?
Molly Ball: I think it actually worked to her advantage that, uh, you know, you could argue that a lot of the attacks on her and the opposition to her is inherently gendered because of the way so much, uh, anger has been focused on, on, on her image and on the way she seems to make people feel rather than on, on her accomplishments. At the same time, the entire American political landscape, ever since Donald Trump was elected, uh, has been defined more than anything else by this tremendous upsurge in women's political activism. And Nancy Pelosi has always worked very hard to get more women to run for office. Uh, it's been an uphill battle until 2016, and in 2016 it just exploded. So I think the fact that she was the first woman speaker trying to return to the speakership at a time when it was this wave of women voters and women activists and women candidates who would power the Democrats to the majority, I think it became much harder to deny her that position given that makeup.
Mark Updegrove: What does Nancy Pelosi think of Donald Trump?
Molly Ball: Well, I don't want to presume to speak for her. She has expressed herself many times, not least by tearing up the State of the Union speech months ago [laughter]. She seems to have quite a bit of disdain for him. But if you ask her, she'll always say, I don't have time for that. She really just, she's really cold blooded about these things and she's not focused on sort of whatever emotional reaction she may have to the many levels on which Donald Trump seems to offend her from policy to, to, to propriety. Uh, but, but she is always focused on getting things done. She's always focused on results. So, she's really not interested in sort of talking about all of the ways that he annoys her. Uh, she's really focused on what she can get done with him. And I think it's been frustrating to her that because he is so fixated on the personality and personal feelings, he's not able to go into those rooms and negotiate with her because, you know, he's mad at her over impeachment and investigations and that kind of thing. So, they haven't spoken in many months, uh, because Trump refuses to speak to her. I think she would still be willing to go into that meeting if she felt like he was inviting her in good faith. But instead she found other partners in the administration actually deals these days, mostly with the, the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and they have a very productive partnership, not least in, in, uh, the coronavirus, these massive pieces of legislation that have been passed. Those have largely been the product of negotiations between Pelosi and Schumer and Mnuchin. Um, so yeah, she doesn't have a lot of use for Donald Trump, but she also doesn't spend a lot of time fixating on him. And, uh, you know, we saw this in the way she sort of slow walked impeachment, right? That she just didn't see the point of it. She, she said from the beginning, this will be divisive, and it'll take up a lot of time and it won't have any results.
And I think she would look back and say she was proven right even though she came to believe she had to do it on the merits, and because her caucus was there. She knew from the beginning that they weren't going to force Donald Trump from the presidency, and so she would prefer to stay focused on legislation that either gets passed and does things that she feels are good or legislation that can, you know, send a political message to the American people that the Democrats are focused on more tangible issues. So, uh, so all that is to say she, she is not particularly focused on Trump. She's focused on her own objectives.
Mark Updegrove: How would you characterize the relationship between Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden? And by extension, what would you imagine their relationship might look like if Joe Biden became the 46th president and she retained her speakership in the house?
Molly Ball: You know, the fact that Biden is a creature of the legislative process, I think would mean that they understand each other quite well. They are not, uh, particularly close in, in his time in the vice presidency, Biden was always the Senate whisper for Obama, right? He went straight to the Senate in '72. He was never in the House. So that was always his focus and where his relationships and his knowledge base, uh, lay. Uh, but they, they, uh, express a lot of warmth for each other. They like each other very much. She didn't, uh, endorse anybody in the primary, but it was clear that she wanted, uh, for the Democrats to have a sort of middle of the road candidate, someone she felt would be more electable in, in the electoral college and not as sort of, you know, far left progressive, even if that's where her personal sympathies might lie. So, you know, she and I talked about the, the 2020 electoral strategy and, and, uh, even though she's, she has a history of supporting single payer healthcare, she didn't think that the Democrats should run on those kinds of proposals because she said that to the electorate, they come across as menacing. That when, when you're saying that you're going to take away somebody's health insurance, even if you're telling them you're going to give them something better, they view that as menacing. So, I think, you know, she's seen through long experience, uh, that if you want to make change that's going to be disruptive you have to do it cautiously.
Mark Updegrove: As you consider Nancy Pelosi's legacy, how does she stack up to the iconic speakers of the 20th century? Joe Cannon or Tip O'Neill, or, Sam Rayburn.
Molly Ball: I'm not a historian, uh, but I talk to a lot of them. And uh, and so one of Tip O'Neill's sons in fact, who said that he believes that she's a much greater speaker than, than O'Neill was. Um, most of the congressional scholars think that she is, uh, the one of the greatest speakers in, in history. And probably the greatest since Sam Rayburn, uh, just in terms of her ability to master the process, to get things done, to get big legislation through the house and through the Congress. So, so they put her up there in the firmament and I think, and I think particularly when you look at the circumstances, the degree to which nothing else in Washington seems to work, and yet she's still able to make the House function, her predecessors, her immediate predecessors to now, uh, Boehner and Ryan certainly weren't able to do that. Uh, so I, I think that, uh, she does deserve a place in history.
Mark Updegrove: Well, Molly Ball, thanks again for your time today and congratulations on "Pelosi."
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Molly Ball: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Mark Updegrove: My thanks to Molly Ball, the Moody Foundation and St. David's Healthcare. And, of course, to you for joining us. Subscribe to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
I'm Mark Updegrove. See you next time.
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