To hear Representative Nancy Pelosi tell it, her quiet but firm push to get President Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race was a simple matter of the ruthless political math that she has spent decades honing a talent for on Capitol Hill.
“My goal is defeat Donald Trump,” Ms. Pelosi, the former speaker, said in a recent interview before the release this week of a book on her years in Congress. “And when you make a decision to defeat somebody, you make every decision in favor of that. You don’t mess around with it, OK? What is in furtherance of reaching that goal? I thought we had to have a better campaign.”
To the former speaker, the imperative to end Mr. Trump’s political career far outweighed the need for any deference to Mr. Biden, particularly since Democrats were at grave risk of losing the House and Senate if the president remained on the ticket. She seemed willing to accept the consequences of anger from Mr. Biden and his inner circle considering what was at stake.
The book, titled “The Art of Power,” is Ms. Pelosi’s retelling of major moments of critical decision-making during the Iraq War, a catastrophic financial meltdown, the passage of the Affordable Care Act and multiple clashes with former President Donald J. Trump, among other events.
But it may be her most recent deft exercise of political finesse and muscle — one that took place well after the book was written — that will stand as a final testament to Ms. Pelosi’s stature as the Democratic Party’s premiere powerhouse of recent decades. In a formidable display of her enduring clout, she helped persuade the incumbent president to abandon his re-election bid to give her party a better chance of holding the White House in November.
Ms. Pelosi plays down her role in nudging Mr. Biden aside and insists the decision was his alone to make. In her focus on polls and fund-raising and in private conversations with the president and rattled Democratic colleagues, she said, she was driven by the single imperative of beating Mr. Trump.
The former speaker said she did not initiate calls with colleagues, trying to dispel claims that she had orchestrated the ouster of Mr. Biden, a longtime ally. But if Democrats triumph this fall after staring down the prospect of a resounding defeat, the maneuvering by Ms. Pelosi — along with personal appeals to Mr. Biden from the Democratic congressional leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York — may turn out to be among her most significant acts.
The words Pelosi and power have been inextricably linked in Washington for more than 20 years, and her book sets out to document how she did it. She rose to the top at a time when men presumed to dominate in Congress and hold women beneath the “marble ceiling,” a term she uses in a nod to the common building block on Capitol Hill that is far more difficult to break than glass. She was prompted to run for the party’s No. 2 leadership post in 2001, after a string of congressional losses to Republicans that began in 1994. She quickly ran into opposition from male colleagues.
“The men explained to me that the House had a pecking order, that other male representatives had been dutifully waiting in line for an upper-level leadership post to open, that I was cutting in and overturning the established order of things,” Ms. Pelosi wrote.
She won that race and became the top House Democrat a year later, a position she held until 2022. Like many of the most successful congressional leaders, Ms. Pelosi had no ambition beyond the House, reveling in the legislative process.
It came with a cost.
In a chapter titled “Leadership’s Price,” Ms. Pelosi recounts the horrific attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi, by a hammer-wielding assailant in their San Francisco home in 2022, and her guilt over the assault. And she passes harsh judgment on Mr. Trump, with whom she fought memorably from their very first White House meeting, when she pushed back as he falsely asserted that he had won the popular vote, through two impeachments.
One notable revelation in the book is a phone conversation initiated by Mr. Trump on the morning of Sept. 24, 2019, just as she was about to announce an impeachment inquiry against him. He started out with a pretense of discussing legislation, but Ms. Pelosi writes that the real reason behind the outreach was to try to deter her from investigating a phone call in which Mr. Trump tried to persuade President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden, his political rival, or risk losing congressionally approved U.S. aid.
“Again and again during the more than 20-minute call, Trump repeated, ‘It was a perfect call …. the call was so perfect,’” she wrote. Ms. Pelosi said she ended the conversation by telling him the truth would emerge.
“I’ve had a lot of conversations with this man,” she wrote, “and at the end of nearly all of them, I think, ‘Either you are stupid, or you think that the rest of us are.’”
As speaker, Ms. Pelosi was known for her ability to produce just enough votes to carry the day on tough issues, applying her deep knowledge of individual members and their needs to accumulate 218 votes, the bare majority, and always holding a few more in her pocket just in case.
“We are all in this party together for a reason, but that doesn’t mean we are always voting Democratic,” she said in the interview about how she approached her job. “Being respective of differences: How do we shape this thing? How do we weave this tapestry? How do we work this kaleidoscope that we get to the number we need?”
One instance recounted in the book is a memorable day when the House came up short of votes. On Sept. 29, 2008, lawmakers failed in dramatic fashion to pass a bank bailout sought by the White House and congressional leaders, sending the markets tumbling and putting the economy at risk. An ominous split screen showed the vote total and the Wall Street chaos.
Ms. Pelosi recounts that Republican leaders failed to produce their promised votes and then tried to pin the blame on her for a speech in which she scolded Republicans for their handling of the economy during the George W. Bush administration and their time in control of Congress. Ms. Pelosi dismisses that idea and notes that, unlike her, “they never had the votes to begin with.” The bailout passed a few days later.
The book also touches on disappointments such as the failure of the Affordable Care Act — her proudest achievement — to include a public insurance option because of stiff Senate opposition. (She chafes frequently at a Senate “bias” on legislation.)
She also leaves out an episode where her determination proved costly: A climate change measure in 2009 that she pushed through the House despite being warned of grave political risks to her members, only to see the Senate shelve it. The failed House bill was later blamed as a contributing factor to Democratic losses in 2010 that toppled her as speaker.
Ms. Pelosi said that was a subject for another day and beside the point in a book about how she was able to accomplish what she did despite the intensely polarized era in which she became a politically charged symbol.
Her secret weapons included “knowledge, judgment, strategic thinking,” she said, and a reputation for not being afraid to forge ahead in the face of opposition.
“You have to act,” Ms. Pelosi said. “If people know you are going to act, that is one thing. If they don’t think you are going to act, they start exercising their options, and your power is diminished.”
She added: “People say trust your gut. But your gut is no good unless your gut is informed, has judgment, experience and — in the case of a woman — intuition.”
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