Pelosi's Power: David Axelrod (interview) | FRONTLINE

so uh when did you first hear of nancy pelosi what was her reputation at the time of course i heard of pelosi uh as someone who was a journalist covering politics very early i mean she was a figure in california politics chairman of the state party out there very close to jerry brown and others and then she went to congress in the late 80s and and you know very quickly you heard her name mentioned quite a bit uh as someone with a future but um i really didn't get to know her very well until um until i was in the white house with president obama do you know her well enough or know about her well enough to know how you you certainly would know about baltimore and baltimore oh yes yes tell me a little bit about how you think that may have formed hugely i i think that i think the greatest mistake people make about nancy pelosi is that the people who don't know her uh at least in the past thought of her as kind of a dilettante from california a wealthy liberal san franciscan she is not that i mean that is an element of her biography but she is completely formed by her experiences as the daughter of a ward boss and mayor of baltimore and i had this discussion with her i've done three podcasts with her and i asked her once what would you learn from your father she didn't hesitate she said i learned how to count okay and i learned that uh i hear you isn't a yes uh okay isn't a yes only yes is yes uh she she has the sensibilities of an old-time ward leader and uh that that appealed to me greatly because i've spent a lot of my life in chicago covering the ward politics of chicago and i have a great reverence for people who do politics on a granular level like that she has i think deep convictions about what government should do and be she's obviously a person of great faith uh and and those beliefs help formulate her uh thinking but when it comes to politics she was trained uh at the at the ward level about how to count votes how to get votes uh and how to how to produce a result her mom kept what was called the favor file and she worked with her mom on the favor file people would file in from all over the city with i need a favor i need something and then they would write on a yellow slip of paper what it was and who they were and they would call those favors in uh later on i'll bet you i haven't asked her yet but i'll bet she has a favor file right now and you could only imagine how big it is oh there's no doubt you know nancy is someone who you can call at the busiest moments and she will file away your concern and she will call you back and say i've looked into this and she may call you back at 11 o'clock at night you know she may call you back in the early in the morning but uh but she never forgets and that is a those are habits formed in the in the politics of baltimore and the ward politics of baltimore old style city politics was all about the symbiotic relationship between office holder and constituent office holders doing things for their constituents and asking their constituents for their support and that relationship is fundamental to how that politics worked and it's how she approaches her politics yeah because she doesn't have a city now she certainly has san francisco in her district but she has a caucus that's a city in lots of ways no doubt fractured and and that's how she's running that's a great that's a it's a wonderful observation because the thing that you know when you work with pelosi is that she has a very very precise understanding of every member of her caucus of what's important to them what drives their districts uh of their donors of every element of their politics she's aware of and particularly the things that are most important to them and those are really important data points when you're trying to move people on a particular piece of legislation she she is a maestro at manipulating all of these different data points to bring about 218 votes or or you know whatever number she needs to get a particular piece of legislation passed david how did she fit in the washington of the 1990s and 2000s things were uh how did she rise in washington do you think well i think she rose through um steely resolve and acumen there's no doubt that as women became a more important part of american politics and you know 92 was a big year for women after the clarence thomas nomination to the supreme court you know there was a much greater interest particularly in democratic politics democratic party politics to elevate women as women were becoming more numerous in the councils of government and so she you know i'm sure that helped but pelosi fundamentally is such a disciplined and canny uh operator and i mean operator in a positive sense that any legislative leader would recognize that as she recognizes talent in her own caucus today and would want to elevate her because they know she could get things done you know she was on the appropriations committee you you put people on the appropriations committee who you know can handle the you know myriad interests requests uh pressures and come to a good result and get things done you know you see a lot of leaders arise from the among the appropriators but you know she got there because of all the habits and all of the skills and all of the discipline that we now see today the things in the in that period are in washington as i look back and even as i remember things were increasingly divided barry cantor told us yesterday that she was a partisan fighter somebody who understands the uh who understood i think that the parties were moving apart do you agree with that characterization of who she was well there's no doubt that she's a she's a partisan fighter um she grew up in a democratic household in the you know sort of fulcrum of of that uh california was a battleground in the 70s when she was a party leader uh there um remember you know ronald reagan was the governor of california in the early 70s um and so it was a very competitive state and you know i think she is a partisan but a partisan in the best sense of the word because i think she believes in some fundamental principles that she associates with the democratic party and she disagrees with fundamental principles that she associates with the republican party so you know to me she's always been a great mix of practical partisan fighter and idealist and uh you know there are principles for which she is uh in this business it's not just about whether the blue team wins it's why and that's what i've always appreciated about her she's not there are plenty of people in congress who are very good at politics but they don't necessarily uh appreciate why they're in the business or why they should be she sees it as a vehicle to do good things to try and help people and you know she's always willing to compromise because compromise is part of the process she understands that you can only get what you can get and you try and get as much as you can get she's as sharp elbowed as anyone in taking out people who are challenging her and certainly people on the other side who who are equally fierce but it isn't just for the acquisition of power that to me seems less interesting to her than how you use it so she becomes whip she decides to take on george bush about the war this is a forward stance at the time yes it was tending in that direction but there she was going right out front and trying to take the democrats with her talking about troops dying and she's accused of you know being a a sympathizer or a traitor or whatever certainly the gop goes after her what's her strategy there david in 2005 2006. well i'd say a few things one is that is partly informed i'm sure by her um by her district and the politics of her district that that's that's one element of it she also uh was on the intelligence committee and probably saw a lot of the the data that uh that many others didn't that helped inform and inflame her thinking about the nature of that war and um it was very clear that the war was going to become a line of demarcation and let's be clear i can't exactly remember i don't know what year it was but karl rove spoke to the republican national committee and he said that americans would rally behind the president because of the war and that was an advantage to the republican party so you know no one should get on their high horse about politization of the war but i think she fundamentally thought the war was a uh was a mistake was going poorly uh and wasn't going to end well but she also i'm sure saw that this was going to divide the country and it was better for the democratic party to be on the right side of that issue which was in opposition do you think of iraq laid the groundwork for obama to win i don't think there's any question that if barack obama had not taken an early position as a candidate for the u.s senate in illinois when most other democrats and republicans were supportive of the authorization for the use of force in iraq if he had not taken that position i don't think he would have been elected president of the united states the thing that distinguished barack obama from most of the other major candidates for president is that most of the other major candidates for president had voted for the war in iraq and he had spoken out against it so there's you know iraq was fundamental to the politics of uh of the 2000s there is a important bipartisan moment in her rise to the top and her career which is the tarp bipartisan bill yeah very beginning yes society's crashing she gets together with the gop she and bush aren't talking but then suddenly she knows she has to talk to him paulson is talking to her almost every day uh it crashes it fails we all remember that scene with the stock market sinking people yelling the bill failed the bill failed she says we have lots of people who say they've talked to her and she says that that was boehner's failure and his favor to bring that caucus along was a turning point from her point of view about how she approached republicans and how she was gonna well i i do know something about this because barack obama was running for president in the fall of 2008 and um we had a strategy meeting and i can tell you the exact date for a reason that will be apparent in a second but on september 14th of 2008 we had a strategy meeting at my office because mccain had named sarah palin as his vice presidential running mate and they were making a little surge and we were we had a strategic meeting to talk about it senator obama asked to attend the meeting which he normally would not uh and at the end and he was very pensive during the whole meeting at the end of it he said i spoke to hank paulson last night something's going to happen overnight i can't share it with you but it's going to have a really big economic impact negative and i told them that we would be as helpful as as we could to try and deal with it and he cautioned us not to he said sometimes good government really is good politics and we gotta we gotta try and be helpful here i want i don't wanna go go awry here and it turned out the next day that lehman brothers collapsed the following week you know congress was trying to put together this tarp legislation to write the stock market as it plummeted president bush called obama we were in the middle of debate prep down in florida and he said mccain has asked for a meeting at the white house with you and the legislative leaders to talk about this they went up to the white house and there was this very strange meeting where even though senator mccain called the meeting he didn't have that much to say about where he wanted to go but what became apparent in that meeting was that and obama was designated by pelosi and others to speak for democrats uh that the house republicans were not on board with the tarp legislation that the republican president was offering and obama was sort of stunned by this as were all the leaders and he said well i guess we can start all over again and the only thing bush said in that meeting was we're not starting all over again and they adjourned and hank paulson found the debt where the democrats were huddled got down on one knee and begged pelosi not to walk away uh from the from the tarp and uh in fact it was democrats who provided the votes that were necessary uh to pass the tarp um and it was a big bipartisan moment it was a historic moment in the senate but she you're good she likes to trying to interrupt you go ahead no please the thing that galls her is she made her caucus her democrats yes uh pay for bailing out the billionaire bankers and banks in in on wall street uh she said if i would have known these guys were so soft on this i would have asked for more in the bill that protected us from what eventually we'll tell you and i will talk about the long-term consequences of the tarp vote right i mean i wonder about how much this affected her or reinforced her understanding of the gop and well i think there's another element of this and i'm sure that this entered into her thinking uh as well so obama pelosi and the democrats supported president bush even as republicans in the house caucus walked away and helped pass the tarp three months later when we were in the full throes of the great recession that was caused by the collapse on wall street president obama was trying to put together a recovery act to steady the economy and prevent a second great depression and republicans in the house and senate uh walked away uh from him and so uh you know that was a sobering moment for obama and probably an enraging moment for pelosi uh having produced the support for president bush and the tarp just a few months earlier just let's step back to 10 000 feet for a second david talk about the consequences of the tarp vote where the democrats it seems like owned it had to own it it was forced on them to own it i'm thinking about the tea party occupy wall street how far-reaching were the consequences on american politics over the decades look we were concerned we we were concerned during the presidential race that mccain that john mccain would turn on the tarp bill and that he would wage a kind of populist revolt to it he did the responsible thing to his credit and did not because the truth was if the financial system collapsed we would be in a second great depression but we understood that uh bailing out wall street was not a popular position and um you know once we were in the teeth of the recession there were you know millions and millions millions of americans who felt like i'm not getting a bailout why are why are the guys who are responsible getting a bailout why are these wealthy people getting a bailout and it was very very politically burdensome it was irksome to people it was angering to people and it was some of the fuel behind the tea party movement i would argue that you know race and culture and a lot of other things entered into it but but there was a populist furor about what wall street had done to the country and how little a price they had to pay for it what are the consequences for her that happens democrats are tagged with it what what does nancy pelosi tell herself looking to the future do you think or how does this change what she does she had been restored as speaker in in 2006. her majorities were extended in 2008 but i think everyone recognized i certainly did and i spoke to president obama about it that 2010 was going to be a bloodbath for democrats and the reason i felt that was because economists told us it's going to take years and years to recover from this recession that's the way it works with financial financially induced uh recessions they don't there's not a v-shaped recovery so people are not going to really feel the uh recovery in by 2010. that alone and the fact that we were holding a lot of seats that we took in in republican territory said to me we were going to have a tough election 2010. pelosi obviously understood that i mean she's as shrewd as there is and i'm sure she was being told that i think what it did do was it probably um fueled her ambitions to get as much done in those first two years of the obama presidency as possible uh out of fear that he wouldn't have the opportunity after 2010 they wouldn't have the opportunity and also the idea that you know if they got a lot done that it might reduce the chances of big losses in in in 2010 so um you know she was very eager to obama laid out a very ambitious agenda for the first two years of his presidency and pelosi was more than a a willing partner yeah this is this is a phrase that we hear today go big and go fast yeah no i mean look i i said today to someone that um democrats are treating this reconciliation bill that she's trying to pass as the last plane out of kabul you know they want to get their priorities on because they think this is going to be the last chance for a while let's talk about this brings us to aca yes with which you're very familiar yes a lot of people we talked to say that there is in the in the territory of that uh in the high story of that a real difference of opinion between pelosi and obama uh about uh politics and bipartisanship in uh in washington she was you know we've got a super majority let's just go for it forget them and obama being obama was not there he was much more interested in the way the story goes uh getting republican participation on things stimulus and other things talk a little bit about did you perceive the difference did it manifest itself in anything in those early days well look i'm sure i am sure i am sure that speaker pelosi was frustrated at the pace of the senate deliberations on the affordable care act um and uh at the same time senator reid and max baucus who is chairman of the senate finance committee were urging uh obama to wait and and work on getting republicans and they uh you know bacchus was absolutely convinced that he could bring some republicans along and out of deference to them and also the notion that a we had run on the idea of forging better cooperation between the parties uh and and b that major social legislation tends to fare better if it's done on a par bipartisan basis you know uh we we gave it a chance in retrospect um you know we we did wait too long pelosi was probably right she was a realist about what was likely to happen uh and based on her experience and what she had had viewed but remember you know she also had spent the last 30 years or well at that point less but um in the hot house of washington politics as it became more and more and more partisan so her expectations were low the country's expectations may have been higher but there's no doubt that there was there was tension because the house was ready to go and the senate was diddling and um you know ultimately that super majority in the senate did pass a bill and then we didn't have a supermajority anymore very quickly because ted kennedy died and the republicans won his seat that scott brown election almost kills aca doesn't it yes and and in fact i think most of washington was uh reading last rights over the aca uh when brown won then there were only two people i think in washington who actually believe the aca could still happen one was barack obama and the other was nancy pelosi and you know we met after the election in massachusetts in the white house and obama said you know we're not giving up and we're going to go underground and we're going to put this together the house was unhappy with the senate bill they felt it was not progressive enough it didn't include a public option which was very important to many members of the house and there is natural enmity between the house and the senate there is friction between the house and the senate so all of that was at play but once we lost the supermajority in the senate it was clear that the only way to pass the aca at this point was for the house to embrace the senate bill and then fix some aspects of it through the budget reconciliation process that wouldn't require a senate majority was very very complicated and when the president asked phil chalero his legislative director where we were in the house phil said we're probably 20 votes short based on what the speaker was telling them of support for the aca and so it became pelosi's task to try and win those 20 votes member by member and it was a virtuoso performance on her part most of it done outside of the view of the public to figure out what it was that each member needed to get to where they had to go uh on this bill and uh you know there is no doubt that there would be no affordable care act today but for nancy pelosi um you know i i'm not sure many other leaders or any other leader would have been able to put together uh the majority that we needed um at that time when we go down into the sausage-making moments and she's expressed this publicly and so of others uh to us that she that there was real anger on her part you and rom advising to that they go smaller that the president goes smaller now she wants to go big uh she says rahm's undercutting her she's yeah it's not me let me just make clear um i i i i did not have that view my view at the front end and i was very cross-pressured because i have a child with a chronic illness i almost went bankrupt in the health care system i knew how urgent it was but i was worried about the political consequences uh for obama of doing what seven presidents had tried and seven presidents had failed to do and his attitude was if it cost me the presidency it's it will have been worth the fight because this is of such moment and once he said that i was all in um so i uh i was on her side of this fight um so it's ron really who's out there undercutting her well he i i and you'd have to speak with him but there's no doubt that rahm felt that uh we should and there were others uh who felt that we should go smaller and we had one great meeting in the white house in the summer of 2009 when we really began to see the impacts of this um uh the political impacts of this and uh an argument was made to go smaller and um the president turned to phil chalero and said phil what do you think our chances of passing this are and phil said well it depends how lucky you feel mr president and obama just laughed and i always always sat under this chair with george washington's portrait behind him and he said phil i'm a black guy named barack hussein obama and i'm president of the united states he said i feel lucky every day and he just laughed and um and it was clear he was not gonna give up he was not gonna go smaller and i'm sure that pelosi was bucking him up on that that you know do not do not do that that uh so um she was in every way a hero of this story it passes what you foresaw in 2010 begins to happen in a big way partly as a result of that and maybe is partly yeah i think oh i think it would have happened regardless i mean we may have been a less a little less dramatic but uh we were destined to lose large numbers of seats in uh 2010 history would have suggested that you know she uh she becomes the subject of the republican campaign 70 million dollars something like 131 000 yeah and pieces of you know whatever not not barack obama nancy pelosi maybe because she's a woman partly maybe but but she certainly made herself plenty uh uh uh controversial but uh does it hurt democrats for her to be so toxic in 2010 [Music] well i don't think that pelosi was in a long line of faces that republican ad makers and republican strategists used to kind of shorthand liberal coastal elites which is how they wanted to paint the democratic party you know ted kennedy for years filled that role today you know it's aoc um and so you know it was shorthand for they're out of touch did it make it worse uh i don't know all i know is that the um you know um if you cost out the the the the net benefits versus the net liabilities of nancy pelosi it very much uh calculates out in her favor yeah i think that the the negative caricature of her may have been effective in some of their precincts around the country republicans um on the other hand her leadership in the house and her tough-mindedness was central to how democrats recaptured the house the first time and the second time and her leadership day in and day out on the hill was sort of indispensable and that will be apparent when she's gone so uh you know that all it's all part of one package you can't be a strong dynamic leader and not end up in some way being caricatured in negative ways by your opposition and she certainly was you know her well enough that every i keep trying to penetrate uh people to find out how does she feel about this what are nancy pelosi's personal reactions to a 70 million dollar campaign that makes it vilifies her you know it's so funny that you say you can't penetrate i i don't really know the answer that be but my my strong feeling about it is that she has an incredibly tough hide about these things she knows who she is she knows what she's about she knows you know what she's fighting for and i've never heard her sort of bemoan the fact that she became a target i'm sure it was unpleasant but she is she is such a fighter uh and she's so disciplined about her goals that i i really have never seen her distracted by that and there are others who you know may give you a different view she's got lots of longtime friends in the house who may share that i don't know if you've talked to ron but you should uh we're yeah we're on the way to him and we've talked to barbara lee and lots of others who talk to her all the time and and ask you anna eshoo is a really good friend of hers and i think anna's this afternoon i think we're going to talk to her yeah she'd be a great source but i mean i think just pelosi is so focused at all times on whatever the goal is in front of her that she just doesn't allow herself to get distracted she gets irritated when people i i think my guess is she probably gets more irritated by members of her own caucus when they are they are less than focused on what they should be focused on uh than she does by you know name-calling from the other side i mean look look at the iconic photo of nancy pelosi in the trump white house while everybody was sitting and her standing uh and uh basically uh confronting uh trump on on his uh lies and uh on his uh you know and on his practices that's who she is i mean she's fearless there's two stories about her that you are part of in some way you're not in in name but uh one is that she just felt even though i know at the east room signing ceremony obama said nancy nancy gave her lots of credit she never felt that she got the credit that she deserved this is a very private thing she's conveyed to people but it's known and the second is that in 2012 she does a kind of victory lap about 25 years in the in the house and and doing events all over the country and she she the way the story goes she wanted obama to appear with her at an event uh but he wouldn't in fact he doesn't even return her call um is that what happened did and so the implication of course other than gets too bad for nancy and whatever is is this an indication that obama and democrats uh distanced themselves from pelosi after the 2010 no not i mean i i can tell you without any i mean i was involved in the obama reelection effort uh at a high level there was never any discussion about don't don't get near pelosi that was no um i mean you know i i can only speak from my vantage point um but there was a lot of reverence for pelosi and a lot of respect for pelosi anyone who went through the affordable care act fight had to come away with deep deep reverence for her because there would be no affordable care act without nancy pelosi and um i i don't know the details of that story i was out of the white house by then um and i don't know what was going on at that moment uh but uh all i know is that barack obama would say to this moment that he was blessed to serve with nancy pelosi that many of the important things that he was able to accomplish in congress would not have happened without nancy pelosi so again i don't know about that particular incident and uh but just on the other i mean i've said it several times um she deserves every bit of credit that she gets and more for the affordable care act and that's most important when you think of the millions of people whose lives were impacted positively by what she did and i think she sees a straight line between the kind of battle she's fighting and the lives that people are leading and and the lives that they may have helped save so um you know it it hurts me to it hurts me to hear that she feels she didn't get enough credit because um she deserves every bit of credit she gets wait let's let's talk about the 2018 midterms moving along in our on our history on horseback david you know let me let me just let me just go back to the 2006 when they took the majority back you know she designated rahm emanuel who was a relatively junior member of the house and i remember rahm calling me and saying you know they want me to do this i really don't want to do it but it was absolutely a brilliant thing to do because you know ram is a heat-seeking missile much like pelosi when he gets a target in his mind he's relentless they went out and they recruited an extraordinary extraordinary classic extraordinary because the members of the the the the candidates they recruited very much fit the districts that they were running in and they were very disciplined about message and not getting drawn into fights that would undercut candidates in the more moderate districts in which they were running so you know it was a master class in organizing the 2006 election uh that propelled her to the speakership in the first place so anyway go ahead just as an aside to all of that if you look at the history of just those two i can't wait to talk to rahm about this but uh so much so close so close all the way through that time period then obama then aca then ramen in a different job but he thinks he's in poaching her and talking to her caucus it used to be his caucus too uh and the personal antipathy between the two of them which apparently emerges has got to be sad for you to see and know about uh although i would tell you that today they're they're very close i mean they talk all the time so i think that at some level pelosi uh understood that uh even though it enraged her that rahm thought he was doing what he what he felt was best for the president which was his job as the chief of staff um i don't think she liked it i think she you know i think she saw it as encroachment in in her domain which is something she does in countenance but they repaired that relationship and you know in some ways um they share this they share a level in appreciation for the tactical elements of politics on a kind of high plain that very few people understand let's talk about the 2018 midterm yeah because it's such a difference between the 06 run what she did what she had to do what she and ron did in a way she encourages her members not to run about trump said that's already activated don't do that let's get ahead of it let's deal with issues but but also the moderates become her real focus yes because she wants to win in trump districts right she wants to flip over what is it seems like a sort of more mature nancy uh pelosi not wanting to go after trump not wanting to you know fight with the president what does it tell you about her and where she is on the arc of her own discovery yeah well look it goes back to the lesson she learned as as a child in her household you know politics is a lot about learning how to count she wanted to get to 218 and above and she was more interested in what it would take to win that majority than in entertaining her own vengeance and hatred for what trump represented and she understood that by making it about policy questions that resonated broadly and and in these swing districts that democrats had a much better chance to get to that 218 and above and she enforced that discipline on her caucus on these campaigns and it was the right thing to do and she won because of it ultimately uh scoring uh rhetorical points against political opponents is a lot less satisfying than beating them and she was determined to beat them and then david the same members try to take her out as speaker why do they see her as a liability what and how does she deal with that i think pelosi understood that there may be some political profit for some of her members in some of these swing districts to distance themselves from her as candidates i'm sure it was irritating to her to have to put together the vote to become a speaker again and the thing about that that was so noteworthy was there are a lot of people in washington who were sort of counting her out there are a lot of people in washington who said hey she can't put this together there are too many people who've pledged not to vote for her as part of winning their campaigns in their districts and and she employed these prodigious legislative skills uh on her own behalf there going member to member having the conversations she needed to have uh and uh you know again just by her own election as speaker when people were ready to give her the gold watch and send her away she proved why she shouldn't go away because she was so damn good at this and so smart about how she dealt with that body and and of course everyone would look back now on that and say well i'm sure glad she didn't go because she she was the she was actually trying to be the minority leader she was the bulwark against trump i mean she was the thin blue line between trump and his trespasses on democracy and democracy itself and so her steeliness and her wileyness became you know in the period when she was minority leader and when she was speaker uh the thing that that reigned trump in and i think most democrats recognize that she's in a tough situation around that time she's the caucus is split progressive and and moderates they want impeachment she's trying to protect the moderates and impeachment won't work anyway she knows it's not going to work uh so she's got a kind of strategy to avoid the impeachment what do you think what do you think that was what was she doing even though she understood that there were many democrats who who were who really believed that impeachment should happen there were some who wanted to impeach trump almost on election because when the russia involvement became known pelosi understood that's not where most of the country was that most of the country did not want them to be absorbed by impeachment and it was really only when the details of ukraine came up that she felt like he had crossed the line and she she could not stop and and had a responsibility to proceed on on impeachment let's talk about the progressives for a while pushing who were pushing for it and many other things there's tensions between pelosi and aoc is the heart of the tension as you can see it from your purge kind of how they understand politics you know aoc came to congress as an activist as a young activist representing other young activists who were impatient with what they view as the incremental nature of policy making in congress and who you know loathed the influence of special interests and reining in their ambitions and so on i mean i think they were very well motivated they wanted to get as much done as they could possibly get done they wanted to deal with big problems and the realities of the legislative process were not something that they were particularly concerned with they weren't particularly familiar with it that is the the place where nancy pelosi has lived uh much of her life the irony of it all was that nancy pelosi who for years and years and years was reviled in republican ads for being this left-wing you know san francisco crazy uh was now being attacked by young activists for not being progressive enough and the fact is that nancy pelosi is a pragmatic progressive i mean there's no doubt that her views are progressive and that she has big ambitions for what government should be doing uh for people but she also has the realists uh understanding of how one has to make that progress and where the limits are of a legislative process in a deeply divided country so there were going to be tensions between the the unbridled idealism and ambitions of the activists who were coming into congress and uh you know the more the more pragmatic approach that she took that was necessary to actually get things done that's so interesting it's true that she says i mean she always talks about hard power versus soft power she of course has hard power and hard power is votes and that's power influence is something when you have five million instagram followers right and that's how he draws the distinction no i i think that you know and i think that it's a frustration for her that there are members of congress for whom that instagram following is fundamental and you don't you don't you don't arouse your base through moderation you don't build your following through compromise but that often is how you have to make progress in a democratic society and so that conflict is something that pelosi understands uh but you know as a leader it has to be frustrating yeah especially nowadays as we as we have just walked away from a president who believed in social media no i mean look nancy pelosi is serious about governing and governing is a messy and difficult process it involves compromise it involves settling at all times for less than 100 of what you want and that's a hard lesson to impart to young activists for whom for whom incrementalism is an invective is a dirty word and so it's become increasingly difficult i think for her as she's moved on in her leadership to deal with these new forces and still cobble together the vote she needs to move things forward obviously we're seeing that right now when you watch uh january 6th and you see what she was doing you you watch her as closely as we now are you certainly because you know her the events the um the days after the days immediately after calling trying to reach pence to remove trump uh calling milly working to get through those moments did it seem almost like she was running the government to you it certainly looks that way to us what it seemed like was a person who believes in the fundamental tenets and institutions of our democracy who genuinely felt that they were at threat who genuinely felt that there was a chance that we could lose it all and that there was a an uncontrolled um you know madman in the in the white house uh and who was worried that these institutions would not hold uh you know i viewed nancy pelosi's conversations in the days in and around uh january 6 as conversations that she initiated as an officer of the government as a trustee of the democracy not as the leader of the democratic party i think this far transcended partisanship for her she was worried we were going to lose our democracy cantor when we were talking to him yesterday had a different view he said instead of coming on camera and reassuring the american people she was pouring gasoline on the fire in those days risking everything and making it worse because she's so partisan yeah well i mean i look eric cantor's views are formulated by through a thousand legislative fights and i'm sure it shapes his view of nancy pelosi but we now have a pretty uh keen lens on the what the president of the united states was doing in and around january 6th and anyone who is not concerned uh about the 187 minutes when insurrectionists were overrunning the capital and the president sat uh inactive and watching television as these events unfolded um you know is missing uh something really fundamental um you know i think this was a this was a watershed event in our history and you know for if you want to talk about partisanship it is fear of trump and his influence within the republican party that would cause people to look away from the events of that day and say this was just a normal this was the normal course of events the president behaved properly you can't whether you're republican or democrat you can't look at those events and conclude that unless you're concerned about the political implications of coming to that conclusion let's talk about the big bill now that's moving through it's a little harder film alert in february so we're going to know the results of this but still it's a film mostly about process anyway uh how is legislating and convincing the member to sign on different than it was during aca for example let's start there you know i think it's harder today than it was even 12 years ago to pass a major piece of legislation because of the tension within the democratic caucus between progressives and moderates you know especially because you have a 50 50 senate and a an almost 50 50 house so pelosi is up there on a high wire without a net and it is a really really difficult task uh to to put this together um you know what progressives in the house saw was um joe manchin and kirsten cinema using the leverage they had in a 50 50 senate to produce the result they wanted and the lessons they took from that the lesson they took from that was we can do that too we can hold up their priority uh if they're going to hold up hours and they they have used that leverage to try and produce the kind of bill that they want they've made deep compromises but at some point you have to you have to say this is as good as it's going to get and we're ready to move forward and that's the point that pelosi has tried to get them to reach the measure of how much things have changed uh was reflected in the fact that the president of the united states went to capitol hill before he left for europe for the g20 meeting and and told the members of the house caucus how important this legislation these two pieces of legislation were for him and his presidency and the future of the country pelosi told them that they she didn't want him to land in europe without this legislation in hand because there were issues like climate change that were important to these meetings and they didn't move they couldn't get the votes so um you know that that was a measure of how much things have changed that president united states could come to the hill and members of his own party would frustrate his ambitions democratic leaders seem to believe it seems to me that passing these bills is is going to help him win in 2022 obviously is that still true um because look i think here's what's true not passing the bills would add to the burden of democrats in 2022 what is true is if joe biden's standing in 2022 is still in the low 40s that will affect every democrat running for congress they have a vested interest a political interest beyond the policy impacts of the things that they're working on they have a political interest in helping biden achieve his goals and they need to have things to run on and tangible things that they can say here is what we produce that actually go to the day-to-day concerns uh in your lives it may not stave off the historic forces that are uh massed against them uh it may not cut the headwind sufficiently but without it uh they're looking at much larger losses my last question david we've talked about how different the politics of the day are today from ach and and uh oas aoc and others where she used to work inside her caucus rather than twitter and all that stuff she focused on legislating is this it for her is this it for her kind i mean forget whether nancy's even here anymore is she the uh is she the last of the boomers is this well i'd say a few things about this mike first of all it is it is a measure of how extraordinary a legislator and politician nancy pelosi is that she has survived these different epics in american politics these transitions in american politics she has uh she has been counted out you know time and again and she's come back and she has adjusted and adapted uh to the challenges that have emerged over time uh and it's a real tribute to her you know extraordinary skills but it's obvious that this is the end of an era i don't think there's anyone who will be able to command a caucus and by command i mean produce the results that she wants she wanted in the way that nancy pelosi has she has an old style facility for pulling the right levers pressing the right buttons understanding uh how to motivate people now there are other levers that are beyond the control of a speaker of the house or a minority leader of the house that come in the form of instagram and twitter and so i do think the job is going to be different uh and to do what pelosi has done so well for so long is going to be almost impossible uh for speakers in the future you want to tell me of a couple couple of stories um during the uh the first year the obama administration i think it was during the early obama administration uh he was determined to try and pass a cap and trade bill on climate change uh and it was going to start in the house and it was you know very controversial and particularly in some of the swing districts where there were energy industries and people were concerned about those and pelosi was concerned about the impact on her members of of the fight even though she was committed to the issue and she agreed to sign on and as that thing was unfolding um and it and it was really a heavy lift uh they asked me to come down to the house to speak to the caucus which almost always meant that they wanted to beat up on some representative of the white house and i was usually the sacrificial lamb in that regard i walk into the caucus and literally before i cross the threshold the speaker pelosi was on me she was pointing her finger in my chest and she said your president said he would be out there campaigning for this bill if we were going to take it up well i took it up and i don't see him out there and if i and and just and then there there's this pause because uh there was going to be an invocation and she clasped her hands and she looked down and as the invocation was delivered and as uh as amen was sounded she crossed herself and in the same gesture she start pointing her finger back in my chest and if he doesn't get out there i'm gonna pull this bill from the floor uh and that's pelosi you know that's that's pelosi and uh uh the second was and this i this is a a a story i i didn't observe this so this was shared with me there was a caucus she was asking for a vote uh it was a difficult vote uh she was walking out uh and a member uh from louisiana democratic member from louisiana uh was heard in a lot loud voice saying it's easy for her to say she's from san francisco and she turned walked back to that member got in his face and said let me tell you something i don't see my grandchildren on weekends because i'm traveling the country raising money from liberals for people like you she said so don't give me that and and she left and of course everybody then said you know you owe her an apology you uh but that's her that's pelosi she's direct you never guess where she what she's thinking and she's a leader and even in choppy waters she's managed to get her caucus to follow and she will be missed i mean i believe that nancy pelosi you know everybody refers to nancy pelosi as a historic figure and she is a historic figure she was the first woman to get elected speaker of the house but she's a historic figure for more than that she is the last of the great legislators in that role she is among those uh historic figures who we will uh who will we will remember as you know masters of the house and so when she leaves the scene and she will leave the scene soon um you know that's that's pretty clear when she leaves the scene uh she will be uh she will be etched in the marble of those capital walls as one of the truly great leaders in american history

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 178,600

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Id: sEzPzgrxLsQ

Length: 59min 54sec (3594 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022