Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi in March 2022
During her initial terms as the House Democratic leader, when I profiled Nancy Pelosi for a Prospect cover piece in 2004, I heard her mutter, once or twice, a mantra that, I should have realized, was also her credo. “No whining,” she would say, “just winning.”
That guidepost is responsible for a number of landmarks in the history of modern American liberalism. It led her, as the House Democratic whip in 2002, to rally two-thirds of House Democrats to vote against the authorization of the Iraq War, despite the support it received from her boss, then-House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt; the bien-pensant editorial pages of the Times, the Post, The New Yorker, and The New Republic (though not the Prospect); and all right-thinking centrists. (That House vote made clear that it wasn’t just the troublemakers at the margins of American politics who thought the war was mistaken.) It led her to steer the Affordable Care Act to passage even when Obama’s chief of staff advised his boss that it couldn’t be done. And it led her to orchestrate the pressure on Joe Biden to abandon his bid for re-election, in a way that made it all but impossible for Biden to decide otherwise.
The New York Times now reports that Biden is majorly miffed at Pelosi, his friend for the past half-century. The one thing he can’t plausibly claim to be is surprised at Pelosi’s actions. No Democrat in the past 30 years has had a clearer sense of what it takes to win, and how campaigns can be won, than Pelosi. She was schooled by two successful Democratic machines—the Baltimore municipal machine of the New Deal and post–New Deal eras, which her father led as the city’s mayor; and San Francisco’s Burton machine, which began when Rep. Phil Burton navigated his labor-left positions through the California legislature in the 1950s and Congress in the 1970s, and which incubated the careers of Willie Brown, Henry Waxman, George Miller, and Pelosi. She rose to leadership positions in the House by forming Burton-esque alliances with power-broker colleagues like David Obey and John Murtha, who were wowed by her ability to assemble majority backing for progressive measures, at times by assembling majority backing for their own priorities, which might not otherwise have passed.
Biden, we’re told, still believes he could have beaten Trump, but that it would have bitterly divided his own party and likely cost the Democrats a number of congressional seats. Pelosi had told her congressional colleagues when they reached out to her during the weeks between Biden’s disastrous debate and his decision to drop out to make clear what his staying in the race would do to their own prospects and the party’s prospects. It was the force of that argument that convinced Biden—always a party man—to leave the race, as Pelosi surely understood.
In 1991, Alan Ehrenhalt’s book The United States of Ambition documented both the decline of political parties in their ability to select, fund, and mobilize support for political candidates, and the rise of candidates able to fund their own campaigns and mobilize support for them. That’s the setting in which Pelosi has nonetheless been able to appeal to common purposes, enforce some discipline, find enough funding, and mobilize enough activists to keep the party and, broadly, its liberal causes (most immediately, keeping Donald Trump out of the White House) as the primary object of Democrats’ ambition, rather than anyone’s individual career. She surely didn’t wish to hurt Joe Biden’s feelings, but she was a pol who puts first things first. We need more such pols.
