Pelosi's Power: Eric Cantor (interview) | FRONTLINE

erica let's start with nancy pelosi the first time you met her what was she like what was her reputation by the time you come to town in 2001 is she considered to be someone who hangs out with republicans i mean what's she like well i think first of all anytime you think about nancy pelosi you have to give her credit she broke barriers she became the first woman speaker of the house and i think that is a historic note to to make sure we recognize um i listen nancy pelosi was never an individual that extended her reach across the political aisle everything that i know and came to know about nancy pelosi in working with her over 14 years was that she was iron fisted in her partisanship and frankly didn't need or see the need to develop relationships across the aisle with republicans analyze her as starting as a whip and in her leadership talents what she bring to bear why she's well known for keeping her caucus together and such um why well i i think the uh she nancy pelosi i think when she began her ascension in the leadership of the democratic party back in the early 2000s up until she became speaker and throughout the first term as in her speakership when i served with her and then when she became minority leader when i became the majority leader there was um a sense that she did have firm control on her troops but again those were days in which she had about a 30 member majority in the house very very different than today and i think perhaps the skills that she demonstrated were much more applicable to that environment than they are to the environment today which is i think an explanation for why she's had so much trouble this term under the obama administration with the majority that she has being so slim the skills that you talk about the um the partisanship that she has where does she inherit that from i mean she her background is she comes from baltimore of course the famous family and her dad and mayor and a very partisan politics is played in baltimore and then she moves to san francisco which is of course a very liberal city and so she never had to deal with republicans to a large extent um how is that defined by how she gets here is it partly one of the reasons why she has a lot of success in rising the ranks of the leadership in the democratic party i i don't think there's any question that uh given today's uh sort of the evolution of politics in the early 2000s up through today so over that 20-year period of time we have seen increasingly the amount of partisanship and resulting polarization both in washington which reflects the same throughout the country and nancy pelosi is a fierce warrior in the partisan battles in washington uh she really i believe carries a disdain uh for my party and in its opposition to what she's trying to achieve and frankly i experienced it uh when i became whip uh and then leader uh in having to deal with her she is resolute and her in in in in her temperament uh and her attitude towards having to work with republicans and if you can recall during the bush years nancy pelosi almost didn't want to be considered as a leader in the house she wanted to be considered leader in par with the president himself and so there was this disdain and almost arrogance that she carried about herself i think which either purposely got in the way of her finding relationships that she could rely on across the aisle which really are non-existent where where does that come from i look i have to believe it comes from this uh story about her upbringing where she uh grew up in the political wars in in the city of baltimore uh and these were some i i don't know i didn't live there i just read about what her upbringing was and certainly the reputation of her family the d'alessandro family in baltimore um i just have to believe that that real partisan fighting edge was developed early on for her uh and that manifested itself now today and i think was probably very attractive to some of the left and the intense feelings that the progress now progressive left has uh towards um towards my party and anything that uh sort of stands for uh sort of the free market capitalism that i stand for so let's talk about the bush years and and sort of continue the down the the track you you're on um iraq of course she comes out very strongly against iraq she comes back and really hits bush early on um for the issue of iraq she's unafraid to um i mean early in those early days really unafraid to play the game of partisan politics i mean what what is she doing how do you see her at that point well i i think that you know looking back you can see that you know she's very strategic and took as close to an absolute opposition position as she could and was not in interested in assuming the gray zone she was all about the black and white all about delineating the the positions of the of her party versus mine and as i said before she was interested in going toe-to-toe with the president in the white house not toe to toe with anybody in congress 2006 midterms the iraq issue is a prime issue they nancy pelosi uses it uh very efficiently and then very successfully why was that and what was the effect on on her career what was going on then is is after the bush reelection uh in 2004 certainly the country became tired and weary of uh the ongoing war in iraq and afghanistan at that point and i think politically nobody says that nancy pelosi is not astute in terms of a democrat partisan and she saw very quickly where the intensity and her caucus was and so she assumed this strong opposition uh to anything in the bush white house uh and i think it was a precursor for where we are today uh in the divide that exists uh between the two parties and frankly that which has divided the country and the effect on her career well i think that at the time um i i do think that the country in 2000 um uh you know experienced a very uh very very close election the bush begore election that had to be decided by the supreme court and i think ever since then we have seen a very closely divided country uh and with the admin of social media and all the forces that have come in to exaggerate and magnify that divide i think the constituencies of both parties are looking to their representatives in washington to fight and it almost now has become more about the fight than it is about the substance and she saw early on that the harder she fought the more attractive she was as a leader uh for her member for her caucus members so they could go home and represent to their constituents that they're fighting hard every single day and not given an inch again with very much prescient i think to where we are today but nancy saw that early on and look i say again there are consequences to assuming that method of leadership when you've got a congress the way you have now that is so closely divided where she is now being held hostage by her own and has nowhere to turn because she has zero relationships on the other side of the aisle talk a little bit about the financial crisis and what happened and how she you know um how she was involved and and and this idea that she learned some lessons that she couldn't trust republicans because of it well in 2008 uh when the when the collapse occurred with lehman brothers and bear stearns and aig all of that when the financial crisis brought on by um the the the housing crisis and the mortgage crisis um there was a very um strong message sent by the bush administration to the hill at the time i was chief deputy whipped and then roy blunt uh and john boehner had become the minority leader president bush was still in office in his last year there was an election ongoing with president obama and john mccain and i remember being a meeting at the white house and um the message was very clear that uh you know we all needed to join together we we wouldn't necessarily know what the future would bring so you know i i remember having to hustle up the votes on the floor and the first time the tarp vote happened on the floor it went down and i'm not sure that if nancy was all in at the at that point and whether her caucus was all in but we quickly regathered as a republican caucus to make sure that we could deliver those votes again not knowing what the future was to bring and given the fact that we had the president and then secretary paulson telling us we had no choice or else our constituents may wake up the next morning without anything in their iras it was that type of a moment so i'm not sure that nancy you know learned any lessons yes or no but she did in her caucus uh step up and and help us get that pass at the time so the way the story goes there was an agreement to well pelosi said i can get this number of votes and and boehner said i'll get this number of votes and then boehner didn't get the number of votes and and the lesson learned according to people that wrote about pelosi or are close to pelosi is that she has learned a lesson here if she hadn't learned it before which is the fact is is that um she you can't trust the the gop whether in the minority or the the majority and that if you've got the votes to do it yourself get it done and that way you'll get more of what you need and you don't have to dither and dather well i i don't think that's true because i mean look at the end of the day tarp was passed with a bipartisan vote i mean without republicans um nancy couldn't have delivered that vote so the fact that it didn't work the first time i remember specifically i had to go back as chief deputy whip with roy blonde at the time we had to go twist some arms and get the members who were unwilling to do this on our part go and get them to step up but nancy didn't have the votes so again i'm not sure that that was any pivotal vote for her i just think listen she's just very steeped in this partisan warfare always has been it's come to roost now it's come to roost now because she's really unable to wield her caucus and the fact she's almost been set up you know by the press and others for failure at this point because she has been reputed to be this mastermind negotiator whip of her caucus and the rest and when she says something you can take her word to the bank so to speak is what has been written about her but i think what we've seen is over this congress there have been several instances in which she announces a vote we're absolutely going to take this vote this week and we're doing xyz and it doesn't come to pass i think that has happened over so many weeks and months at this point even the press corps which has been so fawning over nancy pelosi is now beginning to really doubt her prowess and i think this all goes back to sort of the method of operation and the severe partisanship that she assumes and it just doesn't work when you have no room to maneuver and even your own members can join in coalition to block you uh and again she has no relationships on the other side of the aisle to turn to just put that that moment of time that vote in sort of a a looking back sort of way of how we should view it i mean it certainly seemed to have been a turning point in politics in america that the uh the tea party began becoming more powerful the uh the right to occupy people on the left uh was becoming more uh um powerful there was a more of a division within both parties did you see that as sort of there was a a before tarp and an after tarp kind of thing look i do think that the financial crisis we're still feeling the aftermath of the financial crisis and i think that the fact that washington stepped up and targeted relief through the big money center banks again ultimately the reasoning was we didn't know if they collapsed where that would leave the everyday americans and their retirement accounts and their portfolios on the stock exchanges we didn't know and so but i think it provided an opening for the almost illiberal socialist on the left as well as the populous on the right to begin to ascend in terms of their appeal to the populace there's no no question about it i mean i remember even uh barack obama himself gave credence to the occupy wall street movement and and repeatedly talked about the 99 versus the one percent this is coming from the president of the united states and certainly nancy pelosi with her caucus was going to jump on that bandwagon too and assume the mantle of a fighter for the people uh and so yes i do believe in this country the divide that we saw in 2000 had a little bit of a receding moment during the iraq war and after 9 11 but clearly as the country began to grow tired of that and then we are upon the financial crisis and there was clearly now a deepening fissure in this country post the great financial crisis so let's talk about aca and the health care debate um nancy pelosi and and obama have had very different views of how to use power and how to move forward with this she said that she thought that obama misread the republican party on on aca that he was he was naive that he she kept on saying you're not going to get the votes we have to go forward uh and do as powerful job make it as big and as and do it as quick as we possibly can um again coming back to the idea that you can't trust republicans what what did you see as sort of that relationship and and possibly a division between how she saw the way forward and and president obama saw well first let's remember uh it was um first during that year when obama first got elected post-financial crisis the first big undertaking was her stimulus bill and at the time it was a nearly one trillion dollar bill to try and address the fallout after the great financial crisis and that that was a bill that spoke to the economy that was a bill that frankly we were excluded from in terms of negotiations as republicans and at that point after obama issued his famous line to me in the roosevelt room you know elections have consequences eric and i won you know we we at that point knew we were not going to be a part of anything that the democrats did obama came in with 77 approval rating pelosi had super majority 30 membered majority in the house there was a 60-vote senate democratic majority we knew at that point we weren't getting anything and they demonstrated that in that stimulus bill but if you recall barack obama wanted to start with the health care bill which you know looking back was not the time to do that because the country was reeling from the financial crisis from an economic and job standpoint but nancy pelosi she wanted to introduce and she brought up a cap and trade bill in the house and that was her issue to want to go in and undertake again in a strictly a partisan bases knew her caucus members and the far left wanted to embark upon this uh agenda of cap and trade during a financial crisis but again so there was a real mismatch as far as what she and the obama administration wanted to do so i i wasn't in the discussions with nancy and and president obama at the time but i assume she had the uh ability to determine the agenda in the house and so they went and tried to do cap and trade which didn't go anywhere in the senate and then after that started the real discussions around the obamacare aca bill uh you know i'll never forget the obama administration came to me um nancy and apparel who at the time was the woman in charge of the obama health care agenda and came into my office and i was a republican whip and asked if we were going to be a part of what they were doing and i said well we've certainly gotten burned on the stimulus so you got to tell me how it is that you're going to prove that you want our help because otherwise it's futile to sit here and discuss and when we got into the substance of the of the bill it was in the house even the white house had joined with pelosi in insisting that there would be a government option under the aca which essentially if we remember that term was for choices for americans and and and for people who wanted um some health insurance you could opt for a government option versus the private sector and in my mind i knew that my members and the members of the republican caucus said hey why are we having the government regulate the private sector but then again also be a competitor to the private sector it didn't make any sense to me wasn't going to bring down costs as we know government can't do that well and so i told them i said we can't do that that is a deal breaker for us so at that point the white house was following what nancy pelosi wanted to do and jamming everything they wanted they weren't getting our help and as we saw what happened is they never got that in the senate anyway so i'm not so sure that um you know it was it was nancy that knew the better way um but it wasn't as if they were um you know that the white house was necessarily listening to nancy or not i mean she did what she wanted so what do you what's your perspective on this the story that you know after scott brown wins and um and they're all of a sudden thinking oh my god we're gonna have to go small and rahm emanuel was talking to the democratic caucus saying we'll go small if we have to and blah blah and she goes to the white house and says no no no we're not going small we're going big we have to go big if you don't go big and you go small you can count me out in trying to push this thing forward if you go for it i'll be involved um but that she was the one that sort of drove yeah this again this is i i'm not sure i'm following the same history books that maybe you are because they had no choice they couldn't go big or small they had to deal with what they were given period they weren't going to get republican support and so that's why we ended up with the mess of the aca that it was because it was never brought into a conference to clean up if you will the provisions um at odds that didn't make sense and that's i believe why we've had this succession over the years of court challenges unsuccessful as they were but there was a lot of gray area left so there was no ability for nancy to say yes or no it was what it was there was no option they couldn't do anything other than take what they had pass whatever they could try and get so there was no there really wasn't a lot of option at that point the consequences of it of course by with time we get the 2010 uh elections is um is pretty dire um for the democrats and she loses her speakership but the the thing the other thing that happened in the 2020 elections is is um she took offense of the way the gop dealt with her there was 70 million dollars worth of ads and stuff that were run about nancy pelosi around the country there was the famous bus you know dumped nancy that was it was all over the country um there was a concerted effort to use nancy as sort of the the figurehead of the democratic party um why why was that instead of going after obama in fact um so why was that was that a smart political move well listen we went after obama too there was no question obamacare was the thing that carried us into the majority and nancy was a big part of allowing that to happen and it was these you know she's got this uh no holds barred attitude that she's going to go run the tables and the other side be damned and that came to cost her the majority in 2010. i don't think this country likes these extreme shifts one way or the other we've certainly seen that over the last decade that increasingly now washington changes hands a lot more frequently than it used to again because the fico electorate and i also think because of the lack of ability to get together and come up with a consensus rather than just do it my way or the highway i think barack obama was a huge cause of that because the last time we ever got together was under bush after 9 11 and and how this country did come together then after that we have not seen that type of bipartisanship since in any big way one of the things that has been brought up which is fascinating is that she at some point i think it was 2006 told her caucus you will not sign on to bipartisan bills what was that all about and what what did that say this was all part of her 6406 agenda i remember and you know it was very clear again nancy pelosi very single-minded very partisan not interested in solving any problems but in fighting the war very attractive to her members especially those in the intense far left and from san francisco representing those values that was very attractive to republicans to go and exploit because she is very much out of sync with the mainstream of this country and the idea of not allowing bipartisanship on bills yeah when nancy pelosi you know send the word out to her members that they shouldn't be cooperating at all with the other side just like she didn't because they didn't want to give our members any shot at claiming legislative victories in the political game and so yeah she's no holds barred politician that was about partisan warfare 100 of the time rahm emanuel helped put that on steroids for her on the floor of the house in 05 and 06 which allowed them to to win back the majority uh in uh in that year trump comes in what was her role with with trump how did she deal with him the battle between that started almost immediately i mean there's the story of the the first meeting where they get together and president trump says a few things about the idea that he would have won the the uh the overall vote in the election and that she calls him on it and says mr president you have your facts wrong and so almost immediately they were up against each other what did you see in that relationship and nancy bell has been very consistent in her uh in her mo year in year out she is a partisan warrior and she saw in trump somebody to come up against uh as as as an equal again he's the president uh she's the democratic leader uh and she's she is um somebody he has to reckon with she didn't give up any opportunity to make a real spectacle of that uh ultimately you know they were successful in in limiting his tenure to one term but it was this again absolute dedication to the partisan fight in and out forget about the solution forget about the country we are about the partisan warfare um by 2018 um they win big she uh will eventually become speaker again uh but she has some within her own party uh uh a group of moderates come after her saying you know you've had your time what that's what does that start to tell you about the democratic party at that point well i mean it's not too uh dissimilar to what happened in my party uh you know on the ascension everybody is unified in opposition and then when you get the prize uh all of a sudden we need to even go further uh and we'll we'll see you know again how long uh uh this international fight lasts within the democratic party uh but i i do think that it's applicable to our system on both sides we are a binary system one part of the other given the structure we have under the constitution and the electoral college um and i think because we have two parties not more those two parties have to absorb the fringes and the fringes is where the intensity is and the democratic party right now the beating heart of that party is bernie sanders elizabeth warren aoc and the far left socialist agenda it's interesting at that point you're making because even with the squad she you know famous stories about her her back and forth with the squad here's these young progressives and she was always the young progressive in the past who come along and are more aggressive and so they start to be a little bit of a break and there's there's there's months of going back and forth about that um does it did that sort of started of a divide because of the young progressives coming in remind you of of any of your problems there's no question that there are a lot of analogies to the aoc progressive caucus and the squad versus the freedom caucus and what had developed on the on the fringe on my side in the democratic caucus i'm not so sure they have the hope hope yes vote no crowd i know in the republican conference we very much had individual members who were worried about their primaries and would vote no on bills they really wanted to pass just to cover themselves in the primary and we saw that on big bills when i was in a leader position when it came to the debt ceiling when it came to funding of government or a host of things that members who really i think wanted to see the government continue but yet weren't willing to take that vote for risk of exposing themselves in a primary nancy pelosi's caucus they'll do that they'll do that on political bills they'll do that when it came to the reconciliation measure or the bipartisan infrastructure bill the far left progressives will stand up and stop that but we've not seen them stand up and stop the funding of the government the extension of the debt ceiling so there's a little bit of a difference between what goes on the two sides and i also think one of the things that nancy pelosi has managed is this ability to be 80 some years old and still be speaker after being in dc 30 40 years whereas you know the culture on the on the republican side is a little bit different we have term limits for committee chairman the assumption is when the party loses its majority that the leader of that party steps down uh none of that has happened on the democratic side and somehow or another nancy's firm grip on her caucus uh has been sustained maybe the next thing i'll ask you is the impeachment so she's trying to keep her caucus together and the progressives really want to go for impeachment she's thinking it's never going to go through senate it's all it it is it will make the base happy but the problem is i got all these moderates uh that we don't want to lose their seats or we want to take back seats that trump had won over that were used to be democratic so she's between a rock and a hard place uh as well what what how did you see that situation no there's no question i think nancy is is also you know she is a veteran politician in this town and you always have to abide by the rule of 218 and she knew that the way that um the democrats found their way to the majority were in these suburban swing seats um you know and so you've you've always got to be mindful of that but yet you realize the overwhelming majority of your caucus is not necessarily aligned with those swing states that are the majority makers and it's a balancing act and and you know pelosi's had to um you know sort of execute on that for many years again i think now though she's having a lot of difficulty uh because the balancing act is so severe uh because the margins are just so slim she has no room to maneuver versus when she first came into leadership she could disregard two dozen people and still be fine the state of the union february of 2020 um trump is coming feeling vindicated because it it's that going to the senate is it's apparent now that he's gonna they're not gonna you know convict him um but he gives the medal of honor to limbaugh and he sort of takes over the room um pelosi seems furious and in the end she of course rips up the speech behind the president how did you view that what does that say about her what what's important to understand look i i don't think that her ripping up the president's speech was um necessarily a surprise given what i know about nancy pelosi she is a fierce partisan warrior and knew the crowd she was playing to she knew where the base was she knows how to ignite the intensity of the base that was a brilliant move as far as the base the activist base of the democratic party including the activist base in her membership in her caucus however to most of us it was disgusting and disdainful for her to do that in disrespect to the office of the presidency but again i talk about this a lot in my private life in the com in the private sector now there is a very different game that politicians play in washington nancy pelosi is an artful player at that game i mean you got to give it to her but there is absolutely um a a commitment to a slash-and-burn partisan war warfare mindset that she has developed over the years that doesn't make a lot of sense to most normal people and they go about their everyday lives the irony i mean that the fact it happens on both sides that the you know the congressman who shouted out you lie uh during obama's uh speech to to congress i mean what's going on well again the you know we we have assumed now in our country the need to see elected leaders fight and maybe not even get a solution as long as they're fighting and i think there are many many causes to why we are where we are i think our system and our country maintains its leadership despite the sort of dysfunctionality that is descended upon washington but i do think there are many reasons why the activists based on both sides are more interested in the fight than they are necessarily in the outcome january 6th just talk to me a little bit about how you viewed the actions of pelosi at that point she she seems to feel that she has to stand in the breach january 7th she she she and polo and schumer call up um the vice president and and trying to get him to invoke the 25th amendment um she's talking to the pentagon about you know the the safety of nuclear weapons um she feels that the president is is sort of only thinking about you know complaining about the election and the vice president is sort of out of the picture at this point she's next in line for the presidency how do you view her actions think about nancy pelosi's actions post january 6. i mean i too was appalled by what i saw on january 6. i had written about it in the washington post about what i thought was wrong with even members of my side that went along with this this myth that somehow there could be a change in the outcome after the states had certified elections but nonetheless you had nancy pelosi uh as a speaker of the house assuming a role that would perpetrate more division that didn't respond to the moment to say we are a bigger country than this we are a model to the world you know we we are here for the people that put us here not the activists who want to continue to see a brawl uh unfold in washington she had no compunction about going in and even lighten it up further i mean she was as guilty of gaslight in the situation as any uh so again i think it is striking to me that a leader like that would ignore the opportunity to try and be someone to bring folks back together again i think it speaks to this very unyielding mentality that nancy pelosi developed very early on to just assume the fight each and every day and fight harder and harder no matter what the situation because she plays by the rules in the halls of power in washington not by the sort of rule of norm and decency throughout the country the quotes from the woodward wood woodward book is she was telling people um the president's crazy now we have to do something this is this is my constitutional obligation this is this is this is hogwash nancy pelosi um saw the opening to have yet more of a fight to pour gasoline on what was already a burning raging fire to excite her activist base and help her members

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Length: 35min 5sec (2105 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022