Winning battles, but not the war
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vigorously defends her performance.
Marc Sandalow, Photography by Mona T. Brooks
It was a giddy moment when Representative Nancy Pelosi—a woman, a Democrat, a San Franciscan—took up the speaker’s gavel and confidently declared that, after 12 years of Republican rule in the House, change was on the way. But some facts are stubborn. Sixteen months later, there are more troops in Iraq than when the Democrats took control of Congress; the public’s view of Congress is at an all-time low; and Pelosi’s personal approval rating has steadily declined. A few months ago, Rolling Stone ran an angry screed by Matt Taibbi that labeled Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada “chicken doves’’ for ostensibly conning the public into believing they wanted to end the war, as they cowered in “one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain.’’
The discontent is especially evident in San Francisco, where many of Pelosi’s constituents are furious about her seeming reluctance to cut the Pentagon’s war budget. Some have protested in front of her Civic Center office; others have taken up residence outside her home in Pacific Heights (a tactic that makes her very angry), and the nation’s most famous antiwar activist, Cindy Sheehan, has moved across the bay and into San Francisco to challenge Pelosi as an independent in November.
If Pelosi is embattled, however, she showed no sign of it during our conversation in her office on Capitol Hill. She projects toughness. Even her predecessor as speaker, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, says, “She doesn’t melt.” There’s been an unmistakable bounce in her step since she got the job, and she speaks with greater confidence and clarity.
Her confidence isn’t misplaced. When Tip O’Neill of Boston became speaker 31 years ago, the Democrats had a 149-seat advantage. Pelosi’s majority is 33 seats. That puts a premium on keeping party members in line, and, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the 50 years the magazine has been studying votes as a measure of party cohesion, the Democrats have never been more united. Though not a gifted orator or visionary thinker, Pelosi is a skilled operator, focused on getting things done. She has earned House party members’ deep loyalty; many credit her with bringing the Democrats back to the majority. When she was minority leader, there was talk of rivals trying to leapfrog over her. That talk has stopped.
“It’s not
an issue anymore,’’ says Representative Mike Thompson, a moderate Democrat from Napa, who, as Pelosi came to power, spent many hours reassuring suspicious fiscal conservatives known as Blue Dogs that she would not shut them out. “Conservative Democrats have been very pleased with her.” House liberals, on the other hand, have given her great latitude to pursue a centrist course when necessary, certain that deep down she is on their side. “She is a progressive speaker,” says Representative Barbara Lee, a cofounder of the Out of Iraq Caucus, whose district includes Oakland and Berkeley. “She shares our views and positions. Believe you me, progressives are in her office every day.”
Frankly, I wasn’t certain Pelosi would talk to me, and not just because she’s no fan of the news media. While covering Washington for the San Francisco Chronicle, I probably interviewed her 100 times, but ever since I’d informed her staff last year that I was writing her biography, she’d been ignoring all my requests for interviews. Some of her associates said Pelosi didn’t want to talk to anyone writing a book as she prepared her own memoir, Know Your Power: A Message for America’s Daughters, which will be out in late July. Nevertheless, Pelosi has always been dutiful about speaking with the hometown press, and she agreed to this interview—after my book was at the printer—for San Francisco.
While most members of Congress are assigned crowded spaces in overflowing buildings across the street from the Capitol, Pelosi has a suite of spacious rooms on five floors under the Capitol dome. The view from her personal office is of the National Mall’s long expanse: the red castle tower of the Smithsonian on the left, the National Gallery on the right, the Washington Monument perfectly framed in the middle. A secure telephone with a connection to the White House sits in the corner.
Our first meeting was canceled when Pelosi became embroiled in all-day meetings with House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to negotiate a $168 billion economic-stimulus plan. Our next interview was canceled when the three went on television to announce the plan. We finally met for nearly an hour late one winter afternoon as the sun cast long shadows across the Mall.
It’s difficult to get Pelosi off her talking points. Colleagues call
it disciplined. Reporters call it scripted. Yet as we talked, she became more animated. Like her critics, she seemed frustrated with the failure to end the war. Even as she complained about not having the votes in the Senate to cut off funding, as well as about a president who vetoed seven measures during her first year as speaker (after vetoing just one in the six years before that), she acknowledged that these sounded like inside-the-Beltway excuses. Pelosi is not prone to acknowledging defeat, though, and is adamant about the success of her speakership. She came to power to get things done, and, she says, she has done just that.
A year and a half ago, when you became speaker of the House, you talked about many coming changes. Are you where you expected to be? Not in terms of the war, but on all the other things. We passed our “six of ’06.” And so many of the things we did, we did with strong bipartisan support—all of them, actually. We passed the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations, raised the minimum wage, cut the interest rates on student loans in half, passed our “innovation agenda,” mandated higher fuel efficiency for cars, passed new lobbying and ethics rules—the only bill we passed that wasn’t signed by the president was on stem cell research, but we’ll get that.
That didn’t surprise you, though, did it? No, but again, we’ll come back with that. But because we did not end the war, and because we fight so much over the war, that eclipsed everything. There is no bigger issue than the war.
So if it weren’t for the war, the story of the Democrats’ first year back in the majority would be different? Well, it isn’t but for the war; I mean, the war is a very big thing. But I do think that when you ask, “Are you pleased with where we are?”—I’ll be pleased when we have a Democratic president so we can end the war, move more aggressively toward universal healthcare, and implement a green, global-warming agenda. We’re making progress, but if we had a Democratic president, it would all be a lot easier. My purpose in coming here was to signal change, was to begin taking us in a new direction, and we have done that. We did not end the war in Iraq, but we did change the debate. The first thing I said the day after we won the majority is, “There has to be a change in civilian leadership at the Department of Defense,” and
Rumsfeld was gone.
He was gone about 45 minutes after you said it. Right [laughs]. I had been saying it and saying it during the campaign, and I’m sure Republicans were telling the president that, too. We established a system to hold hearings that would hold the president accountable in the cost of the war, whether it’s the cost in lives and limbs—the biggest price, of course—in dollars, in military readiness, in our reputation in the world. We just haven’t been able to stop the funding, and that’s because we don’t have the 60 votes we need in the Senate. When we put a bill on the president’s desk, with a goal of bringing our troops home, he vetoed it, and that’s the last bill we could ever get to him.
There was a period over the summer when it looked like Republican support for the war was wavering and perhaps Bush would make some changes. And we thought, “We demonstrated that we can put something on your desk. Now we’re going to negotiate.” Bush said, “We’re going to send our people over.” He sent his chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, and budget chief, Rob Portman, to meet with us. They came in and basically said, “Nothing is going to change.”
The White House said that? Yes. “Nothing is going to change.” And we said, “This is supposed to be a negotiation.” “Nothing is going to change. You’re not going to get the 60 votes in the Senate.” We knew at that moment he was in for at least a 10-more-years war.
I remember talking with you just before the 2006 election, and you spoke then about its being a 10-year war. You also said that if the Democrats won the Congress, you would be much more persuasive in changing the president’s mind, because he’d see that the public was rejecting his policy. But he didn’t. In the conversations that I had with the president privately, with Condoleezza Rice on a number of occasions, privately with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, with all the principals, it was clear to me that Bush is going to leave office with us still in Iraq.
That was clear long before the election, wasn’t it? We thought the will of the American people, the statement of the American people, might have an impact on him. And if not on him, on the Republicans in Congress. You’ll recall a whole grassroots mobilization, as recently as this past August,
to go to these Republicans in their districts and change their minds.
And it looked for a moment like it was working, when Senator John Warner of Virginia spoke out against the president’s Iraq policy. Warner never really stayed with the issue. He’s a lovely, beautiful man; I have enormous respect for him, and a lot was riding on where he came down. And he went with the president, as he always does.
But you have said many times that there is nothing as persuasive to members of Congress as the voice of their own constituents. Eloquent [laughs].
Their voices were pretty eloquent in August. So what happened? You have to understand, the Republicans in this Congress were not looking for a way to change their vote, or to convince the president that we shouldn’t pursue this war. They are fully complicit. They not only support the president’s policy, they defend it.
Even so, it seemed to many that even the Democrats in Congress moved slowly. The first vote was a nonbinding resolution on the surge, opposing Bush’s plan to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq. I don’t know why you’re saying we moved slowly. We took up the surge right away and voted that down.
Slow in the sense that the Out of Iraq Caucus, for instance, and the Progressive Caucus would have had you take up even stronger resolutions more quickly. To do what, though? To impose withdrawal deadlines on the president. To impose stronger deadlines. We did. We came in in January; we had a bill to redeploy the troops out of Iraq on the president’s desk by May. So we moved rather quickly. It had to go through the Senate and all the rest of that, and then he vetoed it.
Why not approve just enough money for the Pentagon to withdraw? You had to win it in the Senate, Marc. You’re not listening.
But since all money bills originate in the House, regardless of what the Senate or the president does, couldn’t you simply refuse to provide the funds to keep fighting the war? No, you can’t do that. If you take something to the
House floor that says you are going to cut all funding for the war, I don’t know if it could pass. But say it could. The Republicans have their options on the floor as well. So when people say, “Stop the funding,” I say, “That’s not how the legislative process works here.’’ The minority has certain rights, too, maybe too many [laughs].
What about conditioning the funds on seeing a timetable for withdrawal? How many times did we vote on funding for the war? Dozens—the funds to be used only to redeploy the troops out of Iraq and to protect the embassy, that sort of thing. We passed that bill as an appropriations, we passed it as an authorizing bill on the defense bill, we’ve had Mr. Ike Skelton of Missouri, who is chairman of the House armed services committee and a hawk in the Congress, take the lead on it. We passed it over and over, but the Senate has not been able to take it up.
Yes, because the Republicans always threaten to filibuster. Our frustration here in the House is that they have not filibustered in the Senate. Neither side has really engaged in a lengthy debate. We should make them debate—we want the Republicans to filibuster.
Why? To make a point—to have them at least go through the motions of filibustering so that the country can see why the bills are not moving forward? [Nodding.] Go through the motions, but they haven’t done that.
How hard has it been keeping the House Democrats united on the war? This is what we believe in, that this war should end. The American people, by the way—when you look at the polls, they want the war to end, they don’t think it was worth it to take down Saddam Hussein, but they don’t think the troops should come home tomorrow. Of course, you can’t bring them home tomorrow. You have to do it in a responsible way. Some people here want it to be tomorrow; well, yeah, but we can’t do it, and we probably can’t pass it. But let me just step back, because we’re getting into the weeds on this. The American people sent a clear message that they wanted a new direction in Iraq. They elected a Democratic Congress. We came here with the idea that we could put something on the president’s desk. We moved to do that immediately. He injected the idea of a surge. We had a big, strong, bipartisan vote against the surge. But you have to
give the president his due. The surge served as a distraction. Its purpose was to create a secure climate in which the politics in Iraq could work and bring some peace there. We were going to know that in 90 days, then it was six months, then it was September. Now the Iraqi government leaders have had their secure time and haven’t done anything. But you see, that’s why I kept saying early on, “Don’t pay any attention to the surge. Just stay focused on the war. Because they are doing this for a reason.” We always want our troops to succeed when they are engaged militarily, so of course we want the surge to succeed. We don’t want our troops to lose.
So the surge has been a successful tactic. It has been very successful, and one of the main reasons is because people fell for it. But again, in record time for us—weeks—we had a bill on the redeployment of the troops out of Iraq; it passed; we sent it back to the Senate—back, forth, conference, the president’s desk, vetoed in May. Vetoed. In May. So the whole legislative process was already done.
OK, let’s move beyond the war to— I’m as disappointed as—I’m more disappointed, because I know better than anybody how bad this war is. I said it was wrong from the start. I warned we were going to have urban warfare and mano a mano in the street; we’ll lose thousands of people. The conservatives practically nailed me to a cross, is that not right? They said, “She wants that to happen.” I said, “No, this is what the State Department is predicting. This is what everybody who knows anything about the region is saying.” When I said the intelligence didn’t support the threat, they said, “You’re calling the president a liar?” I came to Congress as an advocate, so I have full appreciation for what advocates do. And God bless them for it, because it’s an important part of our process. But that doesn’t mean that we have it within our power to end this war. It simply isn’t so. So now we have to make the case as to what the costs of this war are, and every aspect, without going over it again, because I do not want to be fighting with a Democratic president. We have to have the Democratic president come from an understanding that this war has to end.
What do you mean, you don’t want to be fighting with a Democratic president? I mean, what is being said on the campaign trail about the war and the rest is important, because that’s
what we’re going to have to deliver on when we win. And I’m absolutely certain we are going to win.
You’ll stake your reputation on it? I already lost my credibility on Kerry. With Gore, I said, “I’m absolutely certain he’s going to win.” With Kerry, I said, “I stake my political credibility on it.” How could they elect George Bush again with that war? And they did.
Harry Britt, your opponent in your first congressional race, told me lately that he still believes what he said in 1987: that in San Francisco, you have the gift of a safe, progressive district, and to represent the city properly, you have to push to the left as hard as you can. There’s absolutely no question that everybody has to try to influence a decision. But the reality is, we don’t have 218 districts like San Francisco in the country. Unless you have 218 votes, you can’t have it 100 percent your own way. You come, you push hard, you advocate for what you do, you’re relentless, you’re persistent, and you know at the end of the day, you are either going to affect the decision or you are just going to be a naysayer.
If you weren’t speaker, wouldn’t you push harder? For what purpose, though? In other words, to accomplish what? To affect policy. And I can already do that.
Why are you better advancing the views of San Francisco moderating over the entire institution than you would be as one person screaming as loud as you can? Because I bring the values of our district to the table as we establish our priorities. What I’m putting forth here, when we’re raising the minimum wage and doing all these things, is a progressive agenda. We didn’t have one in 10 years. No. We didn’t even pass the 9/11 recommendations under the Republicans. And you know what? We have a huge number of progressives in the Congress. I mean, in the Bay Area, we are very proud that we are so progressive, but I don’t think we should think of ourselves in an elitist way—that but for us, the country would not know what the right thing to do is. There are progressives from all over the country who have maybe a different view on how to move forward on certain issues. The difference between a Democrat from the Bay Area and the general consensus in our caucus is not that great. We have our people on the right, but they largely vote with us. And that’s not because we’re doing conservative stuff here. People share our values. They want to help working families; they want to have initiatives on global warming. We had Republican support for some of that as well. But this isn’t a meeting of the local Democrats. This is the Congress of the United States. So we build our consensus, and where
we have agreement, the boldest possible action, that’s where we go forward.
You sound much like you did 20 years ago, when you said, “I’ll talk San Francisco values, and they’ll listen.” Well, that’s right. It was the same thing on AIDS. I said, “We’re going to get billions of dollars more funding,” and I went to the appropriations committee and did it. No offense to Harry Britt; he could have done a fine job here, I’m sure. But I knew what I could do. And they listened. And now I’m speaker of the House.
Has being a woman been an issue as speaker? No. Once you’re speaker, it’s not an issue. When I became Democratic leader, it was over. And I didn’t run saying the party needs a woman in leadership. That would have been probably the last thing I would have done, because it would not have been successful.
You didn’t need to say it, but many felt that way. They may have felt it. But if I didn’t have my own credentials in terms of knowing the policy and knowing the politics, and having relationships with the people, I would not have become the whip, the leader, then speaker. I feel very confident about my role as speaker and my comfort level with who I am and why I came to Washington.
Is your reputation as a San Francisco liberal something you have to contend with? Of course.
Of course? Do you have to convince people that— It’s not a matter of convincing people. I am a San Francisco liberal [laughs]. So what’s the deal? I think they have gotten used to the idea that what we stand for in San Francisco is jobs and healthcare, and education and environmental protection and peace, and the rest of that. That’s a very common agenda.
But since you became a party leader, you’ve had to prove to the moderates and conservatives that you’d be a great Democratic leader, not just a force for liberals. I don’t see it that way. I see this as a progressive Democratic caucus. There are people who are more progressive, and some who are more conservative. But the issues that we come to Congress to deal with—jobs, healthcare, education, and global warming, issues of war and peace—are ones that are shared by the caucus. I would never be anything other than the person that I am. I never went to anybody and said, “I’m not as liberal as you think I am.” They know exactly who I am. There is no issue that I haven’t spoken out about on the floor, whether it’s gay marriage, needle
exchange, medical marijuana, you name it. [
Laughs.] I have not hesitated to go onto the floor of the House and say, very recently, “I believe we should have legislation that does not discriminate against transgender people.”
But the protection for transgenders was cut from the bill on job discrimination. Because it couldn’t win. We waited for weeks for the grassroots to get the votes, and they came back and said the votes weren’t there. The issue is, do you have nothing, or do you have something? You think they ever had a speaker of the House who went to the floor to advocate for transgender rights? I don’t do it just for hometown consumption. I say it because it’s what I believe. And I want my members to see my comfort level with the progressive agenda. My issue is not to make them think I am less progressive than I am. My issue is to let them see how comfortable I am with that position, and how I know it will soon be theirs. [
Laughs.] It’s just a matter of time.
Marc Sandalow’s biography of Pelosi, Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi’s Life, Times, and Rise to Power, came out in April.
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