The FRONTLINE Interviews

John Lawrence

Former Pelosi Chief of Staff

This interview appears in:

Pelosi’s Power

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John Lawrence

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Jan. 6 and the Aftermath

On Jan. 6, 2021, we all sat there and watched what happened.Who is Nancy Pelosi at that moment?What parts of her are coming to fruition?

I think a few of her basic traits probably rose to the surface.One was an institutional one.She views herself as the defender of the House, the House as an institution, both in the way in which the House is presented, as a lawmaking body, but also as a constitutional body, an equal branch of government.That's a very important concept to Speaker Pelosi.

And it also plays out in the day-to-day way in which she runs the speakership and she runs her relationship not only with the executive branch but with the Senate as well.She views herself as a defender of the institution of the House of Representatives.And I'm sure that, like many other people who were in the building that day, but in her case to an extraordinary extent, she felt that her institution and the constitutional nature of the House were under assault.

And on a personal level, the destruction in her offices, the fear of her staff, the note left on the desktop, the picture of the guy with his feet on her desk, how would she have reacted to that on a personal level?

I think that the speaker has been in politics long enough to be able to weather criticism and to weather disagreement, even vociferous disagreement.And so the notion of being challenged or argued with, that's second nature to her.But I think the affront to the office of the speaker, the affront to her colleagues and to the institution, that that kind of an insult meant would be very difficult for her because it felt that what she stood for and what her responsibilities were were under assault.

For the next couple of days, with the call to the vice president with Sen. Schumer, with the call to [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark] Gen. Milley, it really felt, I gather, like a time of constitutional crisis.What do you figure she saw her role as in the divided nation America had become?

Well, you know, I would say, whether it's Jan. 6 or Jan. 7 or five years ago, or when I was the chief of staff, to be quite honest about it, she was, on the one hand, obviously the leader of her party and the leader of the House, but she always—and I know this will probably come as a great surprise to many people, particularly those who are not enamored of Speaker Pelosi—she's always put a very high priority around the issue of bipartisanship, I think for a variety of reasons.Not to minimize the differences that there are between Democrats and Republicans—I think she recognizes that as much as anyone in politics does, but I think that she recognizes that legislation is stronger and endures longer if it has bipartisan support.

On the other hand, she's a realist, and I think she understands that there are historical forces that have developed over the last several decades that have raised hyperpartisanship to the point where one can hold out your hand to try to be bipartisan, but you also have to be realistic about the fact that if you cannot achieve that, then you have to go forward.She would always say we would seek common ground, but if we can't find that, then we have to stand our ground.And I think that very much speaks to how she views her relationship with the other party.

Pelosi’s Early Life

… Take me back to Baltimore.Set the scene as you know it from things she may have said to you about life with her father, "Tommy the Elder," and her mother, "Big Nancy," but as it really relates to her perspective on how to be a political leader, where that comes from, what she saw, what she carries with her throughout her life.

So I wouldn't want to exaggerate my familiarity with that part of her life.I think probably what I know by and large is what people read or know by virtue of having read about her rather than having heard it from her.I would say that at the heart of her early years is the importance of family and the primacy of family, which is very, very important to her; certainly the primacy of religion.Her faith is extremely important to her.And I do think that, you know, the folk tales of her manning the favor box and helping out in elections, that certainly she was—and she would talk about going to the House floor and some of her father's experiences with testifying, Eleanor Roosevelt testifying before his subcommittee.These were very important historical experiences that I think helped shape her.

… So I would just say that the story that I heard about her father probably that makes the most impression on me was right around the time of the Affordable Care Act.She was asked, "What is the most important lesson your father taught you in politics?"And she said, "Get the votes."And the reporter said, "Well, that's not very inspirational."And her response was, "There's plenty of time to be inspirational.Get the votes."And I think that tells you the basics of what—how Nancy Pelosi sees politics.

All business in that way, right?

Very transactional.

Pelosi and Bush

… I know you're there when she makes the decision that she's going to take on George W. Bush about the war in Iraq; that it's something she has a position on, but she also thinks the party, the voters, the Democratic voters are in this place, too.Explain why she decided and what she did about the war in Iraq in '05-06.

I think the most important aspect of her decision-making at that point was her expertise around intelligence issues.Remember that she had been appointed to the Intelligence Committee in the 1990s and ended up serving as one of the longest-ranking people on the Intelligence Committee.And because she was on the Intelligence Committee and then becomes the Democratic whip, then becomes the Democratic leader and then speaker, she has an access to a level of intelligence briefings that's far beyond that available to most members of Congress.

And I remember how forceful she was during the debates over Iraq, and particularly leading up to the election in 2006 when Iraq is a defining issue in that "Six for '06" new direction campaign, that there was no credible evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that whatever George Bush's reasons were for taking the country to war and seeking the authorization for the use of military force to send Americans into that war, that it was not justified by the kind of evidence that she felt was urgent and necessary.

And I think it's important to keep in mind that she was the only member of the Democratic leadership, I believe, who voted against that authorization for the use of military force.And [Richard] Gephardt was still the Democratic leader when it was voted on.And so she, as she emerges into the role of both whip and Democratic leader, she has planted that flag of Democratic opposition to the war very, very firmly from the outset.

And there were about—well, there was, I think, a majority of the Democrats in the House—I think I'm right on that—who voted against the authorization for war, and she naturally as a result became viewed as the leader of that faction, I think.

I'm not trying to minimize others, and she obviously brought people like John Murtha (D-Pa.), Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), all of whom lined up around the issues of needing conditions, needed a timetable for withdrawal, needing all these types of limitations which for the most part they were not able to pass because of President Bush.

But she made it very clear from the outset, both as leader and then certainly as speaker, that it was going to be very, very difficult to get any support for the military policy.

Now, I do want to add something else, which I think is really important, because she was especially concerned that her opposition to the decision to go to war did not in any way indicate a lack of support for the men and women who were in uniform.I think she and many other Democrats felt that during Vietnam, a lot of the anger about the war was played out on those coming back from the war.

And as a result, she would make it a point to go to Iraq, to go to Afghanistan, to visit the troops on a regular basis.She created the Wounded Warrior program to hire people in Congress who had served in the war.She opened up the Speaker's balcony to veterans to come on Memorial Day and July 4 for the concerts.And she passed this new GI Bill which was the most generous GI benefits in the history.

So she bifurcated this opposition to the war policy on the one hand with a compassion for the men and women who found themselves on the front line.That was very, very crucial to her.

Of course, even as she does all of that, the Republicans react with force, accusing her of divisive politics, accusing her, "How dare you take on the president of the United States.It's almost a traitorous act."How did she feel about that blowback from the Republicans?

The speaker, like many members of Congress, does not accept the idea that the president alone makes determinations about either foreign policy or military policy.I think it's very important to note that when overseas, she has always subscribed to the notion that you do not criticize the president's policies.So when she would go to Iraq, or I was with her in Afghanistan, she would articulate concerns about those local governments, about the role they were playing either with respect to the military or corruption, but she would not challenge the basic decisions about having engaged in the war overseas.

But back at home, that's a very different issue.I mean, I think those who grew up in the era of Vietnam learned a very fundamental lesson about the danger of ceding to the executive branch exclusive decision-making about the role of the American military, over both engagement and over the management of foreign conflicts.And that's simply antithetical to anyone who came out of that Vietnam experience with the kind of skepticism and opposition that Pelosi did or that many others in Congress did as well.

I think it's very opportunistic when people choose to criticize presidential decision-making.The same Republicans who may have criticized her for demanding, for example, a timetable for disengagement or for insisting that President [Nouri al-]Maliki or others in Iraq or Afghanistan live up to reforms and ends to corruption didn't hesitate to criticize President Biden when they disagreed with his decisions on Afghanistan.So I think it's opportunistic.I don't think that bothered her or shaped her view one way or the other.

I think that it is, again, her—she views her role, properly so, as defending the constitutional responsibilities of the Congress and particularly the House of Representatives.The Constitution gives the Congress the ability to appropriate money and to write laws.It establishes the executive as the commander in chief, but it doesn't say that the executive, the president, has exclusive authority or exclusive knowledge with respect to the making of military policy.And so it's a shared responsibility, and that's how she believes it should be exercised.

How in his face to Bush was she?

Over Iraq?

Over the war, yeah.

Well, I wouldn't say it was in his face.She certainly would never be disrespectful to the president.I mean, you know, she would—whoever the president was.I was there, obviously, for Bush and Obama.There are disagreements with both of those leaders, and she would always do that in a respectful way.

But she's very decisive when she would talk about, for example, on Iraq, there were ongoing debates about whether or not, as we were asked to continually fund $80 billion, $100 billion, $120 billion during the course of the year in supplemental appropriations, whether or not there should be conditions put on that money.Should we be able to measure whether or not the Iraqi government, for example, was making progress towards assuming responsibility for training its own troops or for conducting operations on the ground or ending corruption in the Maliki government?And she was very insistent upon that, and insistent not only demonstrably face-to-face, but repeatedly would put conditions into those appropriation bills, and Bush would veto them.And she would make clear her dissatisfaction with that.

But, of course, we did not have the votes to override those vetoes, and so, pretty much, Bush got what he wanted with respect to the war.And it depended upon the election in 2008 to really change the course of the war, because you had to dispense with that veto, which basically was George Bush's leverage to continue to run the war pretty much as he wanted.

The Financial Crisis

… Let’s talk about the financial crisis.We'll take you to 2008.You're in the room for that meeting at the White House where [Sen. John] McCain has suspended his campaign and Obama's been tasked with the job of representing the Democrats.But she's there; you're there.Take us into the meeting, please, and tell me what it reveals to Pelosi about the Republican Party in that moment.

Well, again, you have to remember, this meeting occurs only a week or so into the crisis…So this is all coming very quickly after Sept. 18, this phone call from Secretary [of the Treasury Henry] Paulson and the chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, who ask her to convene a meeting of the leadership to deal with an emerging crisis, and she promises to do that in the next day or two, and they say, "No, it has to be tonight, because by the end of the weekend, we won't have an economy anymore if we don't act quickly."

And so the pressure was on to act very swiftly, to act on a bipartisan basis.And this happens just weeks before a national election, which is really one of the most amazing legislative stories that I could tell about her leadership and about that particular period in our history.

About a week into this, she gets a phone call from Sen. McCain, who is of course the Republican nominee, and he expresses dissatisfaction with the pace of the negotiations, not playing any role himself in those negotiations.And she reprimands him and says, "That's not true; we're making a lot of progress."And she was making a lot of progress with, particularly, Hank Paulson, who was very much a part of these negotiations.

Shortly thereafter, she gets a phone call from the president and is told that McCain wants to suspend the election, suspend the campaign and convene a White House meeting.Well, this makes no sense to anybody, including, I should add, the Republican staff, very high-level staff that I was dealing with.The White House staff I think is not particularly pleased with it.But of course, President Bush is in a situation where his party's nominee has asked for a meeting.He can't very well say no.

And so everybody—Obama did not want to do the meeting because he thought it was maybe a way to get out of the first debate which was coming up.But everybody agrees that you have to go ahead and do the meeting.And of course, from Obama's standpoint, he realized he could be in a situation not that long from now where he's asking for the congressional leadership to come to the White House, so maybe it's not such a great precedent to say no.

We're meeting in the Cabinet Room, large room, big table.And the decision had been made beforehand by the Democrats, Sen. Obama and Speaker Pelosi, Leader [Harry] Reid, that we would allow the presidential candidate to take the lead.Everyone understood there was going to be no deal-making at this meeting.We were going to see what Sen. McCain had in mind, and as the meeting evolved, basically went around the table and talked about the nature of the crisis, the urgency of developing a very decisive, swift response.I mean, jaws were still on the table.They were talking about $600, $700, $800 billion of money going to the most unpopular human beings on the planet, the Wall Street people who had precipitated the crisis.

And eventually Sen. Obama says, "Well, we haven't heard from Sen. McCain yet, and it was his idea to call the meeting.What do you think?"And Sen. McCain gave this very rambling, incoherent speech that addressed none of the urgent issues, gave us no sense of where he was prepared to go or what he was prepared to endorse.

In the middle of this, I will tell you, President Bush leaned over to Mrs. Pelosi—and of course they had a somewhat tense relationship—and said to her, "I told you you would miss me when I'm gone," and she said to him, "No, I won't."

But when Sen. McCain finished the conversation, Obama said, "I don't know what that is."And Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who was there as the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, says, "I don't know what you're talking about."And Bush said the exact same thing: "I don't even know what the hell you're talking about."

And so it was a very unsatisfactory meeting from the standpoint of, you know, when you bring that kind of collection of national leaders together, the press that's standing outside the room is going to want to, you know, they're going to expect some major development that had occurred.

…I guess the best-known story that comes out of that meeting is that as we were filing out, nothing having been accomplished at the meeting at all, a complete waste of everyone's time, but we wanted to go out and say something to the press that was upbeat, because the last thing you needed to do was to go out and suggest that in any way forward momentum had been slowed.That would not—that would probably not help the market in the situation.

So the Democrats were all gathered in the corridor.McCain sort of slinks out, hugging the wall, without saying anything, and Mrs. Pelosi and Sen. Reid say, "Well, let's go into the Roosevelt Room, which is nearby, so we can figure out what we're going to say to the press."

And then we're in there for a few moments, and then all of a sudden the door opens, and Hank Paulson comes in.Remember that Paulson and Pelosi had had a very good working relationship earlier that year on the Bush stimulus, and he had given her heavy credit for having pulled that together.And so they trusted each other, I think, and they had a good relationship.

He immediately falls onto his knee and says, you know, "Nancy, don't blow this up," based on what had just happened in that room.And, you know, she gives this very lighthearted, you know, "Hank, I didn't even know you were Catholic" response to him, trying to keep it light.

I will say this: Immediately after this meeting, I was called by very high-ranking—let's just leave it at that—Republican staff people, and they said, "Your guy," meaning Obama, "was the only person in that room—he was in charge of that room.Our people were terrible.We had no idea what we were doing." …

So they were not pleased with that meeting.And essentially the effort to write the bill, as well as the presidential campaign, went on as though nothing had ever happened.It was a road bump in history, but useful, I think, only because it indicated the lack of engagement by McCain and the difficulties maybe that we were going to face down the road in getting the level of bipartisan support we needed for TARP [Troubled Assets Relief Program].

That's actually what I was interested in, wondering about.To Speaker Pelosi, it seems like the Republican Party is in disarray.The president is looking at the exits.It's got to have her worrying a lot about the bill, what are they going to ask for and how are they going to get the votes to get it passed.Was that essentially what the problem was?

… There were a lot of problems.The biggest problem, of course, is that you're only a few weeks—you're about six weeks from a national election, electing president, the entire House, one-third of the Senate.You have a severe economic crisis.You're shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month.You have the collapse on Wall Street, and incidentally, simultaneously, a collapsed building in the auto industry at the same time, and you need the Congress in incredibly quick time to pass this legislation.

When we had the initial meeting on September the 18th and they asked for $700 million, Harry Reid said, "The Senate can't flush a toilet in the amount of time you're talking about passing this legislation."And Hank Paulson said, "Well, then we're going to flush the toilet on the American people if we can't."So I think people understood the urgency of it.

It was always a predicate of this legislation, however, that it was going to have to be bipartisan.And Speaker Pelosi told John Boehner, her Republican counterpart, the Republican leader, "You're going to have to put up 100 votes and we'll put up the rest, but Democrats are not going to be bailing out the Republican president."She was very angry at Bush over his efforts to deregulate the industry, and I think subsequent reports of what had happened, certainly the report of the commission that studied the origins of the crash, blamed that hands-off regulatory record of the Bush administration for contributing to the problem.

And so, she did not want to own this problem as a Democratic problem.She said, "You're going to have to put up votes, and we're going to need the administration very heavily engaged in coming up with that solution."That met with some mixed results.

But there were some problems along the way.Probably the one that I'm most familiar with was that when the bill was sent up from the administration, it was only three pages long.It essentially was a blank check.In fact, that's what the Republican ranking member on the Banking Committee, Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in the Senate, said, called it.

And it only said that, "We're going to give you X-hundred billion dollars, $700, $800 billion."It didn't have a word in it about repayment, and Mrs. Pelosi was the one who insisted that there be full repayment, with interest, as a precondition.

And there was some real strong pushback from the Republicans on that point, particularly one confrontation I was in with Judd Gregg, who was the senator from New Hampshire, and who suggested, amazingly, that if the companies failed to repay, that that money should come from domestic spending, from the domestic budget, and I told him to go down the hall and talk to the speaker to see what she thought about that idea.So that didn't work out for him very well.

And in the end, we did have full repayment.And in fact, federal taxpayers made $100 billion off TARP, off the interest payments, so it was actually one of the more profitable investments that we've made in recent history.

But there were other issues that Democrats felt very strongly about that the Republicans refused.We wanted to put more of a stimulus into the bill, job creation, something for Main Street as well as for Wall Street, if you will.The administration was locked in against that, as were the Republicans.And we were told flat out that if we put in restrictions on companies providing golden parachutes to retirees or restricting their ability to offer bonuses that the Republicans would simply walk way from the legislation.And so there was very little in it on that.

So there were these disappointments along the way.And we did make some of these concessions in the hopes of keeping the Republican votes together, because if it had been only up to the Democrats, we would not have been able to pass that legislation.Between conservatives who did not want to—who didn't like the deficit implications, liberals who didn't like the bailing out of Wall Street, lots of other people who were dissatisfied at the absence of foreclosure assistance to people who were losing their homes, we would not have been able to pass that legislation alone.

As it turns out, of course it doesn't end up passing the first time.I don't know if you want to get into that separately.

We'll get there in one sec.The bipartisan bill, the bill you're talking about, the first bill, there's a phrase that keeps going around about how we're going to hold our hands and jump off the cliff together; that's what was essentially happening.

Right.

How hard was that for her to swallow?

Well, I don't think it was hard for the speaker to swallow because I think that she knew that one of the burdens that comes with being in the majority is that you have to respond to a genuine national crisis.I mean, one of the difficulties that you have to face when you're a leader, whether you're president or a congressional leader, and I think it's one of the traits by which you are historically measured, is how well you cope with challenges that you'd rather not face.

And in this particular situation, of course, Nancy Pelosi was not interested in sending hundreds of billions of dollars to people who she had been criticizing for months for the way in which they had been running the mortgage system and the banking system.She had been an active critic of that for many months.

But the urgency of the crisis transcended that.It transcended the election.It was her obligation as a leader.These kinds of big pieces of legislation, I mean, traditionally, whether it's modifying entitlements or this kind of an emergency aid package, are bipartisan by nature.And of course that has become far, far more difficult as Congress has become more partisan.I think that, you know, it was always a sore point with a lot of Democrats, and I'm assuming with her, that when it came to bailing out Wall Street, Republicans were able to produce ultimately about 80 votes in the House and a larger number in the Senate.

A few months later, when it came time to pass a stimulus to help people who were losing their homes and losing their jobs and schools that were closing and first responders who weren't getting paid, there were no Republicans to be found.So it shows why there was all that pressure for adding a Main Street component to the Wall Street bill.And sure enough, as soon as Wall Street was taken care of, the Republicans didn't want to be part of the solution anymore, and in fact weren't part of the solution.

Back at the moment of the vote that Friday afternoon, it becomes clear Boehner can't keep the caucus together.The bill fails; the stock market is falling.We've all seen that moment.Many of us watched it on television—"The bill failed!The bill failed!"Seven hundred, whatever it was—

777 points, yeah.

Unbelievable.Did Pelosi learn a lesson from that moment?

Well, I think that—I don't know that she learned a lesson.Look, she had said to Boehner, "You've got to produce 100 votes," and he didn't.He said, "I can't."In fact, just a couple of days before that, they were having so much trouble getting Republican votes that his chief of staff called me up and said, "I think you'd better just pass this bill as a Democratic bill."And I said, "That's never going to happen.That's just not going to happen."

When the president was trying to get votes, President Bush was trying to get votes, he called everybody, all the Republicans in the Texas delegation.I think he got two of them to vote for the bill.Jeb Hensarling said he wouldn't vote for it because it was a step on the march to socialism.I mean, very ineffective in getting his own people.

So I don't think it was a question of her learning a lesson.I think it was—I mean, there were lessons learned, no question about that, but I think she just felt that this was something that she had to do, but that others were going to have to put themselves forward as well.In Boehner's case, you know, he went to the floor, he pleaded with his members, he used language on the—he called it a "crap sandwich" on the House floor; he used stronger language in the Republican Conference meeting earlier in the day.And he and others—Jerry Lewis from California—said, "Look, I didn't come here to vote for this legislation"—of course nobody else did either—"but we have to do this."

I think what was really surprising to them, and to a lot of people, was that with no alternative at all possible—no alternative at all possible—so many members of their party were prepared to simply allow the economy to crash and burn.And of course that's exactly what happens, at least for the next couple days, as the reality imprints itself on everyone that this vote had disastrous consequences.

I think somebody we talked to or somehow we know that Speaker Pelosi said working with the Republicans turned out to be the biggest waste of time: "We should have written the bill we wanted on the first night."

Yeah, I think I wrote that in an article that I wrote on the subject.You know, the issue here, of course, is, could that bill have actually passed the House and gotten past 60 votes In the Senate?But it is certainly true that, for all the concessions that were made, Boehner was not able to deliver the votes.And ultimately, you know, when the second vote comes, he doesn't deliver the votes either, but she is able to get more Democrats to cross over, and people who had voted no [to] vote yes, which was actually much tougher to do the second time.

I could imagine that she would say what we've heard her say before, which is if you have the power, use it.She had the votes.Make it happen; get it done.This will emerge again in the ACA that we're about to talk about.Just go big and get it done.It seems like that was the message she learned, right?

Well, you know, she prides herself on being a vote counter, and she knew where her votes were.And she, I'm sure, knew that unless the Republicans produced the votes that she had demanded and that Boehner had agreed to provide, there were not going to be the votes to pass the bill.

So she went to the floor, you know, hoping, I think, that the Republicans would be able to produce the bill.She gave a very strong speech, and some Republicans blamed that speech for frightening off Republicans, but several Republicans afterward said that that's ridiculous.I mean, if you were going to vote for the bailout, the fact that Nancy Pelosi gave a strong speech doesn't have any doesn't have any real impact on that.

And in fact, what people fail to realize about that is that Nancy Pelosi has her own factional issues within the Democratic Caucus.If she's asking the left to vote to bail out Wall Street without a component in there for foreclosure mortgage forgiveness, without a component in there for stimulus, then she's got to have some pretty strong language to keep the left in line.

And so I think that was sort of very opportunistic, to blame her speech.But actually numerous Republicans came up to me afterward and said that's nonsensical; those people were never going to vote for that bill.

You say TARP ignited a new level of partisanship and division that has debilitated American political institutions in the ensuing years and a feeling of betrayal among the public.Talk about that for a minute, will you, John?

You know, the Tea Party emerges, I think, more in response to TARP than to anything else.It feeds on the Affordable Care Act, but what portions of the American public saw with TARP was the government rushing in to save the wealthiest people in the country while it was not prepared to do something equivalent for the working person who was losing their home or was losing their 529 college account or was losing their job or their unemployment assistance.And because it was such a direct—you know, it's one thing to say, well, you know, the government sort of one hand washes the other and they contribute to campaigns and then they pass laws.But here you had it in stark black and white, you know, people who are the most powerful economic people in the country coming to Congress, hat in hand, getting what they want.And it seems to confirm the very worst interpretations of the synergy between government and special interests, and particularly very affluent special interests.

And I think that's what you saw in that rhetoric that come out of it, and you begin to see the Tea Party organizing long before the ACA, before the Affordable Care Act is well defined as an issue.I think it's what really—TARP is what really ignited and served to confirm those suspicions about the conspiracy, if you will, or the alliance between big government and big money.

Pelosi, Obama, and the Affordable Care Act

Let's talk a little bit now about the ACA and the new president, President Obama, and Speaker Pelosi's supermajority….

So talk for a little bit about the different perspectives of Speaker Pelosi and Barack Obama on the idea of bipartisanship.

Well, we had some early conversations with the president-elect—he wasn't even president at that point—where he made clear that his preference was to try to do things in a bipartisan way.And I think we were pretty frank.I remember one particular conversation that we held in the speaker's office, that our experience to date with the Republicans was—did not inspire that level of confidence that the president came in with.And he was very clear.He said, "Well, I still want to try to do that."And it was not that unusual, even in private discussions at that point, for Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Reid to say, "Well, yeah, I mean, we'd like to do it on a bipartisan basis, too."I think they had less expectation that it might really work out in that way, but I think they all shared that goal.Certainly the stimulus experience did little to encourage that.

You know, we—people sometimes forget, we had done a stimulus under President Bush in January of 2008.We then did the TARP legislation with President Bush.We did an energy bill with President Bush.And there was bipartisan support for these, but what really changes is that after the 2008 elections, the Republicans just take their marbles and go home; they don't want to play anymore.

… So as you move into ACA, where there's been a historic Republican opposition to greater federal involvement in health care, even if you put it in the context, which the president often did, that we have to, even if you don't care about health care, we've got to do this because of inflation in health care costs—it's driving the deficit—we saw very little likelihood.

Here's the thing that you have to remember: This notion that Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid just put their head down and said, "The hell with you Republicans; we're just writing this bill the way we want," that's not true.That bill went through three House committees.It took months to get through those committees.True, we were negotiating with the Blue Dogs as much as we were negotiating with the Republicans, but in the course of those committees, Republicans had plenty of opportunity to offer amendments.And they did; they offered dozens and dozens of amendments in the Commerce Committee, in the Education and Labor Committee, in the Ways and Means Committee.Some of them passed; some of them didn't.

That's the nature of the legislative process.If the way you respond is, "Well, if my amendments don't all get passed and I don't get to rewrite the program the way I want it"—which is what Eric Cantor said about the stimulus—"I'm not voting for the stimulus unless it's the stimulus I want," which had led to the president to say, "Well, I won the election"; Eric said, "It's got to be the way I want"—then it's not bipartisan.It is.It was bipartisan.You can't judge the bipartisanship by the final vote.And I think the speaker was very clear about this.The bipartisanship was the process.

People say, "We want to go back to regular order."There was regular order.There were committee meetings.The Senate held more debate on the Affordable Care Act than on any other piece of legislation in the previous 20 years, I think it is.

So there was a lot of opportunity for participation.What there wasn't was a willingness to say, "OK, I've offered my opinions.Some of them didn't accept it.Some of them haven't been accepted, and so I'll make a good-faith judgment about this bill."Obviously there was no good-faith judgment; not a single Republican would vote for it.And that tells you that it wasn't the level of participation, because they had had just as much participation in that legislation as they had had in many, many other bills that they had ended up voting for.What was different was, they didn't want fingerprints on the Affordable Care Act.They didn't want to give the Democrats a victory, and they didn't want to give President Obama a major victory.

And so it didn't—in a sense, it didn't matter how many concessions you made.The bill that went forward was very different than the bill that Democrats would have liked, or that most Democrats would have liked.Certainly would have liked to have a public option.Many Democrats would have preferred to have single-payer.There were many concessions that were made, and many of them were made to conservative Democrats on issues that should have appealed to Republicans as well.

But no matter what you did, it was very clear that there was not—and that whole situation was—and maybe others have told you this, but one key point, I think it was just before the Blair House summit, President Obama has a conversation with Sen. [Charles] Grassley (R-Iowa), who is one of the people who people think there's some chance—I'm not sure why, but they think there's some chance that Sen. Grassley might support the Affordable Care Act, and President Obama says, "Well, if I gave you this amendment, Chuck, would you support it?"And he said no.He said, "Well, how about if I gave you this amendment?Would you support it?""No."He said, "How about if I gave you all your amendments?Would you support it?"He said no.

Well, you know, if you're at that point, that's—the failure to be bipartisan then is not because the authors of the bill say, "Well, in that case I'm going to go forward anyway."It's because you have an unwillingness to engage.I'm sure the Republicans would say there wasn't a good-faith effort, but the fact is, they did have that opportunity in committee.If they couldn't convince the majority of the committee people to support it, well, then they lost those votes, but it didn't mean they didn't have the opportunity to participate.That's just not true.

… We're at the virtual finish line when Scott Brown wins Massachusetts for Sen. [Edward] Kennedy's seat, and now the bottom has dropped out of everything that's going on.Explain to me what then the speaker said the Democrats should do.

So just to remind you or to set the scene, we're in a situation now where the House has passed a bill; the Senate has passed a bill.The Senate bill passed while there were still 60 Democratic votes in the Senate.The House—now you have the election in Jan. 19 I think it was, early January, of 2010.Scott Brown wins, and the Democrats now have 59 seats.The House bill cannot pass the Senate because they can't get 60 votes to get past the filibuster.The Senate bill cannot pass the House because it has numerous provisions in it that House Democrats find objectionable, and of course you're not going to get any Republican votes.

So you have this standoff where you have—almost impossible for Democrats to believe, right?We've been trying to pass comprehensive health care for 100 years.You now have actually passed it through the House, you've passed it through the Senate, but there's no mechanism to bring them together.You could go to a conference committee, but that conference report then could get delayed and delayed and delayed because you don't have 60 votes.

So you're sort of nowhere.And there is then the possibility of doing a couple of other things.One is a scaled-down bill.You just take what we were calling the Titanic bill: Women and children first.You just take a small bill, and you let that go through, hopefully, or you break the bill into little pieces and you pass them individually.Those didn't—those didn't either satisfy Speaker Pelosi or President Obama, I think; it wasn't aspirational enough.But also all those little bills still would have had the same filibuster problem over in the Senate.

Sorry for interrupting, but she got good old-fashioned PO'ed in a meeting with the president and Rahm [Emanuel], that Rahm had been out there undercutting her, throwing her under the bus, selling, "Well, we might lose, but we'll come up with a nice, small version," what you're talking about, John.Were you there for any of those moments where she accused Emanuel of undercutting her?

Yeah, I was in several meetings where the topic of what she would refer to as a "namby-pamby approach" came up.And she—I don't know so much that she reprimanded Mayor Emanuel.I think that what she said to the president quite directly was that that kind of a limited approach was not consistent with the aspirational goals of your election as president.And to his credit, I think the president was more wedded to the notion of continuing to go forward with a big bill than some people on his staff were, and more so than the general reports have indicated.

I think that there were times when it appeared there was no way forward, and there were conversations at the White House about some sort of a stripped-down approach that were entertained.But in general, I did not see that from the president.I never saw the president endorsing that kind of a limited approach….

So there was that option of breaking the bill into little pieces or just doing a small bill, the Titanic bill, or there was also this option of reconciliation.And that, as everyone now understands, but it wasn't altogether clear at that point—the advantage there was that you could super—the advantage there was that you could avoid the Senate filibuster, because it only takes 51 votes and you had 59 Democrats.But you couldn't put everything into a reconciliation bill that would have been in the big bills because it has to pass tests that the Senate parliamentarian poses due to the rules of the Senate, and so it would have been a stripped-down version.

So it was very much a secondary fallback position that was available, but was not going to be expansive enough to really address either the policy questions or the cost-control questions that were driving the health care legislation.

So they decide to try to go forward with reconciliation, but she's light; she doesn't have enough votes yet.Somebody told me I think she was 60 light or something like that.And she's got to try to push it through.Tell me what it's like to deal with her at a moment like that.How does she operate?How does she hold the caucus together?What are the tools she uses at a moment like that, or what were the tools she used at moments like that?

Well, let me just clear up where we—what the options there were, because she didn't make a decision to go forward with reconciliation.The key decision that got made was this: Very often when you're in these kinds of standoffs where the House has a position and the Senate has a position, the Senate's instinctive reaction is, "Why don't you just take our bill, because we can't pass your bill, and we got 60 votes to pass this version."You hear this from the Senate; it's a major theme of my—of this book that I'm writing on this period.The Senate's go-to position always is, "Just take our bill.You may not like it, but it's the best you can do."

That's where we ended up with TARP.That's where we ended up with the stimulus.And in this case, there were enough provisions in the Senate's bill that the speaker said, "That's never going to happen.It's never going to happen.We are not going to take your bill."

And that left us in the wake of the Brown election in a very bad position.I mean, people couldn't—didn't want to believe we had come that far past the health care reform bill through the House and Senate and we couldn't—you know, we were in the red zone here, but there was no way, no way forward.

And there literally didn't appear to be, right?The House bill could not pass the Senate, Senate could not pass—and that's when the two-bill strategy emerged, and that was the key to the entire health care denouement, if you will.The House would pass the Senate bill; the House would then pass a reconciliation bill fixing what was wrong with the Senate bill, and the Senate would pass the reconciliation bill.That was the theory.

The problem with that is that if the House passed the—first the notion was, we'll pass reconciliation first, just to make sure that part of it doesn't fall by the wayside.And the Senate parliamentarian said, "Absolutely not.You cannot do that.You can't amend a bill that hasn't been enacted yet."And then they said, "Well, we'll pass them together," and they said, "No, the Senate bill must be signed into law before the reconciliation bill can come up.Otherwise it's a violation of the Senate rules."

Well, essentially you were telling the House: Take it on a promise.This Senate, which is always trying to ram its bills down your throat, which is always telling you why your bill can't pass the Senate, you just pass their bill, and you can bet we're going to pass that reconciliation bill, changing provisions in our own bill.

And Pelosi said, you know, "That's a very, very tough ask."And I was actually in the meeting with her and Sen. Reid, and Sen. Reid said to her, "Well, what if I gave you a letter and that letter was signed by 51 Democrats saying, 'If you pass the Senate bill, then we promise we will pass that reconciliation bill'?"And Mrs. Pelosi had to leave to go to a meeting, and so I was left with Sen. Reid; he and I were old colleagues from his days in the House.And he said, "Well, what do you think, John?You know, could that work?"And I literally laughed, and I said, "Sen. Reid, the House of Representatives is never going to believe a letter signed by 51 senators that they'll do it."

Well, I turned out to be completely wrong because that's exactly what happened.Ultimately we did pass that Senate bill under huge protests from our folks.And then we get to this reconciliation bill, and, you know, when you're in a situation like this where you're facing close votes—let's remember a second: The House was passing these health care bills by two votes.It's not as though she had 240-some-odd votes.But she was losing over 30 members; she was only passing them by the narrowest of margins.

So, you know, everybody in those situations, whether it's the liberals who were saying, "We're not getting the public option; we want to have a national exchange instead," or it's the conservatives saying, "Well, we think this bill costs too much, so we have to have something to deal with our rural communities," everybody—the leverage always comes out in Congress when you have a narrow vote, right?

And so she had both the procedural two-step with the Senate and House bill, and then the reconciliation bill, and she had to keep everybody on board for both of those bills, including getting Democrats to—I mean, by far the hardest was getting Democrats to pass the Senate bill and then believe that the Senate was really going to come through and vote for the reconciliation bill that cleaned up pieces of the Senate bill.

So that was very tough.As to how she did it, she has an extraordinary ability to sit and talk with people, give them their opportunity to make their case.I've seen her do it for hours in a way that—I remember once I went into a meeting with Tip O'Neill and my former boss, and we got like three minutes to make our case, and that was it.I've seen Nancy Pelosi do that for an hour and a half just to get one vote.I've seen her do it for an hour and a half at 1:00 in the morning if that's the only time that was available.

She had to do that with women over the abortion issue.She had to do that with liberals over the single-payer.She had do it over Medicare for All.I mean, there were these different factions because she knew, because she can count better than anybody in the place, that she was really only dealing with a margin of two or three votes.

I always say that she's a firm adherent to the political philosophy of that great British political theorist, Sir Mick Jagger, who has taught us, you don't always get what you want, but you get what you need.She can figure out what people need, and she can listen to them and do—give them the best that she can do.And even if you end up not getting everything you want—and very often you can't because it negates what other people want—her ability to sit and talk to people, I think, persuades, whether it's people on the right or the left or the center of the party, that she's made that effort, that they've had a good-faith opportunity.

Contrary to, you know, some, it isn't like she beats them on the head or something, where she says, "I'm going to take you off committees," or that sort of punitive approach.I think that's not her style.Her style is, "You've got a legitimate right to make your case.If I can do something, I can do something.Maybe I can't do something on this bill.Maybe I can give you something on another bill, or we can make sure that one of your amendments comes up."So it's that—it's that ability to survey the entire landscape and see where you can make it easier for somebody to come on board.

But eventually, eventually, you have to, you know—when you're the speaker, you obviously have to say, "We've gone as far as we can go.It's time to vote."And she understands that, and she impresses that on people, that she's given people what she can give them; now it's time for them to reflect a similar level of loyalty and commitment to the caucus.

Republicans Campaign Against Pelosi

… By 2010, Nancy Pelosi, not Barack Obama, but Nancy Pelosi is a 50-foot tall Pelosi.Nancy Pelosi is the subject of $70 million of Republican money being used in attack ads.How does she feel about that, and how do Democrats feel about Pelosi being the poster child for everything that's wrong with America, according to the Republicans?

Well, I think that she has a pretty strong understanding of political messaging and framing.She spends a lot of time thinking about that.And we all understood, and I'm sure she understood as well, that focusing opposition on an individual, just as so much attention had been focused on President Bush, is a critical ingredient.In fact, many of the consultants that were brought in in 2006, 2008, to advise the Democrats, the advice that they gave them was that step one in successful messaging is take down the opposition.And you don't try to take down the entire opposition; you find something or somebody who symbolizes that.

And so I don't think that came as a great surprise to her.I don't know that anybody, even given her incredible talents, can take the kind of vilification that was thrown at her and not feel it to some degree.But she really didn't show it very much.I have to say.She didn't—I think there were times when she and people who supported her would have liked more people rising to defend her.

I think there was a growing sense, as we got into the election season of 2010, that the White House anticipated the House was a lost cause and did not rise to defend the House, was putting its eggs more into the Senate basket to try to save the Senate.You know, not only the Republican headquarters, but even in Capitol Hill offices, there were these "Fire Pelosi" signs.Michael Steele, the head of the Republican Party from Maryland, went on a bus tour, a "Fire Pelosi" bus tour.So they personalized it a great deal.

She really kept the focus on the members.I think that she gave the members, you know, a lot of latitude about, "Don't make this about me.This is about your record.Run what's comfortable with you; that's what you run on."And you know, I would say that she probably would have been happier if she saw more people rising to defend the role that she had played, but primarily she was concerned about the members, and she was concerned about those individual races.

First, why her?And second, why didn't they defend her?Why didn't the president and others at the White House? …

Well, I mean, there were people in the White House who were actually hurting.Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, was going on national television, on weekend shows, and talking about how we were going to lose the House and, you know, there were more than enough seats in play, and did that repeatedly, which infuriated Democrats on the Hill.

Look, I think that one has to acknowledge that there was a misogynistic aspect to this.Nancy Pelosi, it was easy to caricature her.I mean, she was the walking dream of the Republican right-wing message machine: a San Francisco liberal, pro-abortion woman, you know, and a strong woman.That lit so many—flipped so many switches effectively for them in a way that if it had been someone else, it would have been far more difficult to caricature her.

So while she was never one to blame her being a woman for why she was being treated that way, I think realistically one would have to say it made it a hell of a lot easier, because if you had a woman in the picture who you were vilifying, it was pretty obviously going to be Nancy Pelosi.

I think what Mrs. Pelosi would say, and did say very often, is, they're coming after me because I'm effective; that's the reason.And they know that if they get rid of me, or they get rid of the Democratic majority, that is the effect, that is the way of undercutting this yet unfinished legislative agenda to which we aspire and that my speakership is integral to achieving.

So I think she understood the notion of taking down the leader.She had been a strong advocate of it with George Bush.I think she could respect that as a strategy.But what the motivation was, you know, I think clearly had a strong misogynistic tone to it.

After the resounding defeat of the Democrats, she's in the political wilderness, and if you've been in power a while, especially if you think of what it means to be the speaker of the House, you're really in the wilderness in lots of ways.How did she handle it, John?How was she in that moment? …

… You know, what I can say is that, politics is a transactional business, and you spend the most time with people who can do the most for you.That's just the nature of political relationships.When she was the speaker, we would have very, very close relations with the Bush White House, even though we obviously had huge political disagreements with them.But I would meet regularly with their congressional people.We would go down to meetings with the president.And those contacts were very useful to us when we did run into the crises that necessitated the Bush stimulus or particularly TARP.We could talk frankly to each other; we had a personal relationship with each other.

And that continued in the first two years of the Obama administration.Obviously we had people at the White House—Rahm had been a House member, and so that was one line of communication.Phil Schiliro was the congressional relations director and was a very longtime Hill staff person, mostly in the House but also in the Senate, close friend and with whom you could speak very frankly.When the election happens in 2010, the first thing that occurs, of course, is you have this lame-duck period where she's actually—in some ways you wouldn't have even known the election happened.That becomes one of the most productive legislative periods over the course of the next two months in terms of pushing through a lot of legislation that, obviously, people understood when the Republicans took over wasn't going to have much of a life to it.And so we got a lot done in those last two months.

But I think it's fair to say in those two years that I was there, the second two years of the first Obama administration, the communication, the contact, the consultation with the White House drops off pretty significantly.And in part that's because once you're no longer the speaker, of course, you don't get to decide what legislation is coming up, and you don't get to design the legislative strategy anymore.And Schiliro left shortly thereafter, and there's no longer a House person as close—Emanuel leaves also in 2010.So you sort of lost some of the House contacts at the same time that the Democrats go into the minority.

… So there certainly was, at least from my recollection, there was a significant diminution of the collaborativeness between the White House and our office because of the change in our status from being the majority to the minority.In the House of Representatives, obviously being in the majority means everything.It's a little different in the Senate because of the nature of Senate rules and Senate operations.But in the House, you know, if you're not in the majority, you're not going to be making most of the decisions that the administration would want to have made.You can't decide that bills are going to have hearings.You can't decide which bills are going to come to the floor.You're really—you're really in a very, very different role, particularly in a highly polarized House where the bills that the Republicans were going to bring to the floor are not bills you're going to want to collaborate with, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act.

She sits there—you all sit there until you leave and watch Boehner burn up, the Freedom Caucus come in, Cantor gets blown to smithereens.It's more and more strident partisanship on the Republican side.She also sees the rise of Trump.Eventually by '16 sees Trump vanquish Hillary Clinton.Thoughts about that?Do you ever remember talking to her about it, or just your own observations of how she was and what she was thinking?

Well, I think as early as the summer of 2009, she—if you remember, the House had hoped to pass the Affordable Care Act before the summer.It gets delayed because of the Commerce Committee.Blue Dog delays it until the end of August or beginning of September.The Senate doesn't pass their bill until Dec. 24.So this is exactly what Mrs. Pelosi was worried about, which is leaving a piece of legislation hanging out there over the summer when members are in their districts.

And what they were subjected to—in my book, I call it the "summer of hate"—but it was a level of bitterness and partisan anger that nobody, I think, had anticipated.Mrs. Pelosi always would say that the value of the House of Representatives, they go home every weekend, they put their hand on the hot stove, they feel what the constituents are feeling.

Well, what they found in August of 2009 was not a hot stove, but, you know, sort of this raging firestorm, people coming into town hall meetings, threatening members.There were reports of district offices, even members' homes being defaced.I had one report of a member who told me that there were guns at the town hall meeting.We had—subsequent to that, we had numerous demonstrations in Washington with … signs with Obama with a Hitler mustache.Or I remember one where there was a sign that, "The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin' African"—I mean, those kinds of ugly, racist events happening.

When they—when we voted on the Affordable Care Act, members were walking across the street through a demonstration of Tea Party people, and people like John Lewis were spit on by demonstrators.

I think that even as early as 2009, certainly by 2010, there was this sense that we weren't just dealing with political disagreement anymore, that something else had been loosed.And whether that was TARP, whether that was the election of an African American president, whether that was the ACA—I don't think Trump was really part of this picture yet—but there was a sense that something had been loosed.

And the interesting thing is that it wasn't just the sense that we had.I was very close to John Boehner.He and I went back years because he was the chairman of the Education Committee when I was the staff director for the Democrats, so we had worked together for five years before I ever went to Mrs. Pelosi's office and before he became the Republican leader.And I ran into him right after the 2010 election in the corridor in the Capitol, and I was congratulating him, you know: "I wish you well—not too well, but I wish you well as speaker.It's a very tough job."And he said to me, "John, in six months I'll be more popular in your caucus than I am in my own."

I saw him six months later.I said, "How's that going?"And he said, "I'm not there yet, but I'm very, very close."He knew I think at that point—and of course after he leaves, he refers to this cohort of new people who come in as Neanderthals and much worse in his book.I think he also understood that this infusion of Republicans who came in, not just conservatives like Boehner, sort of lower-tax, anti-regulation, but anti-government, really motivated by anger.It was a different group, but it was also going to make it very difficult to govern, because they didn't care about things like making the government work efficiently.If the government worked inefficiently, that was fine; it proved their point about the government.And of course ultimately, they goad him into closing down the government in 2013 by not passing a continuing resolution.

So I think that, from 2009 on, there was a growing sense, even though I myself have written about it and many political scientists and historians will look at the roots of partisanship and hyperpolarization reaching back into the '50s, certainly the beginning of the '60s, by the early first two years of the Obama administration, you're seeing something very different, far more malevolent, far more destructive, because it's not just about rolling back liberal activist government; it's about stigmatizing government itself and those in government.

And it's very hard to negotiate with people under those circumstances.You know, it's easy in Congress to negotiate if we have differences of, you know, you want to spend this much; I want to spend this much; we can find something in the middle.But if one group is just not interested in policymaking, is not interested in coming up with legislative solutions, there's not much to negotiate with.And I think you see that in the Republican legislative record, with the exception of tax cuts, which, with all due deference, is not the toughest thing to pass through the Congress, especially if you don't have any intention of paying for it, which is what you saw in 2013, sort of again in 2017.

Really, the major legislative initiatives of the Republicans was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act.They never really made that transition from opposition to governing.They didn't really have an effective governmental platform.Of course, in 2020 they don't even have a platform at all.And I think that has evolved over this last 10-year period in a way that makes governing very difficult.

That's why, when she becomes speaker again, in 2018, she's mostly there to block what Trump is doing.And then when Biden is elected, of course you have all the things we talked about.You have these high expectations, big promise.But of course you don't even have the big margins anymore to be able to do them, so you have high levels of dissatisfaction and no interest in participation by the other side.

So that over a dozen years before locked in to the American political structure in a very destructive way.

Lastly from me, where are we now in the Biden administration?What's at stake?… You said the next election is going to lead to democracy being badly damaged….Talk about what's at stake, what she's thinking about what's at stake and what they do in these months.

Nancy Pelosi is a person who believes that when you have power, you use it.That doesn't necessarily mean, of course, that you use it recklessly.That doesn't mean that you try to steamroll people.

But you're relentless, right?You're indefatigable.You have your target.I think in the current state of things, she has a narrow margin of only a few seats.She has a narrow window.In the House, you never are guaranteed that you're going to be in the majority for more than two years.And I think she is going to try to push as much through that window as she can.

She's got to do it legislatively.I think she knows that, because however good you can feel by an executive order accomplishing your legislative goals, it's ephemeral and it's indefensible once you lose the White House.

Once you push through legislation, whether it's the Affordable Care Act or whether it's, in this case, an expansion of the Child Tax Credit or pre-K, universal pre-K, it's very hard to unwind.It's one of the reasons Republicans are so opposed to even small steps forward, because they believe, with some accuracy I think, that once you give people benefits, it's very, very tough to take it away.

And I think that Mrs. Pelosi understands that it's more important to get a piece of this legislation through and have it rooted as a fundamental part of the statutory framework of the country than it is to have a rhetorical argument that goes nowhere.And then you have President Biden issue an executive order that lasts 20 minutes into the new administration.

So there's an incredible pragmatism to it, but it's driven—it's driven by the fact that ultimately you've got to get 218 votes.You've got to get 51 or 60 votes in the Senate.Otherwise, as she says, we're just having a conversation.

I think Nancy Pelosi went to Congress to do a lot of things, but it's not just to have a conversation, OK?She has a different standard for achievement, and the achievement is, "What can I get enacted now and then build on it later?"And that's really the way she has approached it.

She starts with an aspirational goal.That's why she doesn't consider herself, I think, an incrementalist.And that, I think, she shares with many of these idealistic younger people who come to Congress.But she also has a firm commitment that "I'm going to deliver legislation; I'm going to get the best bill that I can," and then it will be up to the next Congress or the next speaker or the next president to embellish that and make it even better.

Why does she decide to go into leadership? …

Well, I think she made that decision, and she was pretty explicit about it, in the very early 2000s when she saw the Democratic, the existing Democratic leadership incapable of winning back the majority, and she explicitly says, "Well, I can do better than these guys."

You know, she came out of the California political experience.She came out of that experience with her parents in Baltimore, focused on ground operations, focused on the mechanics of winning elections.In the late 1990s, the Democrats lose a series of elections and end up in the minority, but only by six votes or eight votes.She at one point promises to win four votes in California.If they can win five votes in the rest of the entire country, they'll become the majority.And we end up losing votes in the rest of the country; she wins the seats in California that she promised.

I think she went into leadership and I think she stayed in leadership because she thought she was more capable of doing the job than other people who aspired to that role.And that meant the whole smorgasbord of talents that are necessary to be a successful leader, everything from an ability to manage the diffuse factions in your caucus, because she could talk in a credible way to the liberals; she could figure out what the conservatives needed to survive.But it also is her ability to count votes, her ability to raise money, her ability to recognize talent and elevate them in chairmanships and subcommittee chairmanships, particularly minorities and women who had largely been shut out of those positions in earlier years.

I think she believes—and it's pretty clear that the caucus has shared that point of view now for almost two decades—that she brings a unique set of skills to that job, and that's how she stays in that job.You know, there have been, as you note, challenges to her as leader, but those are sort of political statements.They're not people who in any way present the panoply of skills or the record of accomplishments that she has.And that's why they fail, because ultimately members recognize that the leadership is not just about doing what they want; it's about managing the caucus and about managing the schedule and managing election strategy in a way that benefits the party.

And she has consistently played that role, and played that role better than anybody else in the caucus was possible to do.

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