Susan Walsh/AP Photo
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill on Thursday
Last week, David Dayen published a review of Molly Ball’s book Pelosi, that was really more of a review of Nancy Pelosi and her leadership style. Robert Creamer of Democracy Partners, husband of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a top Pelosi ally, took issue with the op-ed. Here is his letter to the editor in full, followed by a response from David Dayen
Dear David,
Normally, I find myself in agreement with much of what you write for The American Prospect.
But when it came to your review of Molly Ball’s book on Nancy Pelosi—and your argument that Nancy Pelosi does not have strongly-held progressive commitments and beliefs—I believe you are flat out wrong.
In the twenty-two years since my wife Jan Schakowsky entered Congress, I have had the occasion to know Nancy Pelosi well. As a political organizer working with scores of progressive organizations, I have also had the occasion to work closely with her—and those around her—to promote, and pass, many critical progressive initiatives.
I can say without equivocation that Nancy Pelosi is one of the most committed and effective progressive leaders and organizers I have ever worked with in my half-century-plus as a full-time progressive organizer and strategist.
I have known many Democratic leaders who are good at messaging, or fundraising, or exercising political power, but who do not have core commitments to progressive principles—or any principles at all except their own desire to maintain and exercise power. Nancy Pelosi is NOT one of them. In fact, she is the exact opposite.
Pelosi’s strong principled character—and her commitment to progressive values— were apparent from the first speech she made on the floor of the House as a newly-elected freshman representative in a 1987 special election.
At the time, the AIDS pandemic was sweeping the LBGTQ community. But serious action on AIDS, and LGBTQ rights, were—unbelievably—still very controversial.
Pelosi told her advisers that she intended to use her maiden speech to plea for action on AIDS and LGBTQ rights. Many strongly advised her to play it safe, not to be so “controversial.” Her answer was to go to the floor and strongly advocate for her strongly-held—and at the time, controversial—beliefs.
She believes passionately that social and economic justice are right, and that inequality and oppression are wrong.
Ask any of the scores of progressive leaders who participate regularly in her almost-weekly calls with progressive organizations. These calls sometimes continue for hours as she explains her positions and listens intently to participants’ views and proposals. Ask these people—who work in the trenches every day to advance fundamental progressive change—what they think of Nancy Pelosi’s credentials as a progressive.
When it comes to your criticism of Pelosi’s handling of the coronavirus, I must also strongly disagree.
At the moment, Democrats control only one side of one branch of government. Republicans control the Senate, the Presidency and the Supreme Court.
Frankly, the notion that Democrats should have “held out” for broader sweeping economic changes “in exchange for coronavirus relief” is simply strange. Democrats are the ones that wanted MORE relief, sooner—not less relief, later. Democrats knew many of their constituents couldn’t wait. Republicans, on the other hand, were perfectly happy to drag their feet at the same time they blamed Democrats for “delaying” needed action.
Republicans were under pressure to pass something – at some point. But without the tough bargaining and strong will of the Democratic Caucus -- and grassroots action -- the Republicans would have passed a completely corporation-focused bill.
Don’t get me wrong, corporations got a great deal in the bills that emerged.
But Pelosi and the Democrats won a great deal for ordinary working people in the bills that subsequently passed and were signed by Trump.
The bills included a $260 billion investment in Unemployment Insurance benefits to match the average paycheck of laid-off or furloughed workers—including contract workers. Democrats also got a 13-week extension of federally funded Unemployment benefits and defeated Republican attempts to claw back $600 in expanded Unemployment benefits—which must now be extended yet again.
Democrats secured a deal ensuring direct payment for workers providing that working-class families were eligible to receive as much as $3,400 for a family of four.
They forced the GOP to agree to $30 billion in emergency education funding, a $200 billion investment in hospitals and health systems, and $150 billion for state and local governments.
In the March bill, Democrats were successful in expanding the size of the Paycheck Protection Program well beyond the amount proposed by the GOP. And we know now, that had it been smaller it would have ALL gone to the biggest corporations that were favored by the banks.
In the April bill Democrats demanded more money for the PPP which had run out of funds, included a complete retooling of the Paycheck Protection Program to make funds available to businesses in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, and massively increased the total relief package well beyond the limits set by Republicans.
None of these provisions would have been in Republican bills.
Those who criticize Pelosi by arguing she should have held out for more in these rounds of coronavirus relief, should specify exactly what additional the Democrats could have forced the GOP controlled Senate to pass and Donald Trump to sign into law.
The Democratic position was to get as much real relief to as many ordinary people as possible, as soon as possible, and then to pass a strong aspirational bill—the HEROES Act—that includes many major provisions to provide increased relief to working families, money for state and local services, funds for safe voting, and repeal the corporate tax break that Republicans demanded in the first set of bills.
The plan was to pass the HEROES Act out of the House and then jam the Senate into passing as much of it as possible before the August recess.
That strategy appears wiser by the day since many GOP governors made things worse by leaving their states wide open to the spread of the pandemic, and that has given Democrats an even stronger hand as the summer has worn on.
Still in the face of this mounting crisis—mostly in red states—Mitch McConnell has been perfectly comfortable delaying any consideration of the HEROES Act provisions for months.
So, even in the face of increased pressure from the public for the GOP to approve the provisions of the HEROES Act, we will have yet to see whether that pressure will result in Republican Senate votes and a Trump signature when the Senate is finally forced to act.
Right now, the job of progressives is to mobilize voters in swing Senate states to demand action from their Senators—to make it politically impossible for them to remain intransigent. That’s what will change votes in the Senate much more than posturing by the Democrats.
Does any of this represent fundamental change in the structure of the economy? No. But sadly, that is simply not possible until Democrats once again control the House, Senate and White House.
And then it MUST happen.
In my judgment, no Speaker in modern history has been as effective at using the resources at her disposal—votes, procedures, negotiating strategies, “political leverage” to get the most for progressive causes.
In hindsight, Pelosi might have played some things differently and improved her tactical position. But I am hard-pressed to imagine that overall anyone could have done a better job in maximizing our position to pass the most progressive bills possible during this pandemic, than Nancy Pelosi.
And I am quite certain that no one is better equipped to position Democrats to increase our House Majority and help to create a Democratic Majority in the Senate and elect a Democratic President.
When Democrats win a “trifecta” in November, I agree that is where the rubber will really hit the road. A new Democratic majority MUST deliver fundamental change to an economy that is currently rigged against ordinary working people and mainly benefits the rich. And that, I believe, is when Speaker Pelosi will rise to the occasion and help lead us into the most progressive period in modern American history.
Robert Creamer
Partner, Democracy Partners
Dear Robert,
I am acquainted with Democracy Partners’ work and the work of Rep. Schakowsky. In fact, just a few weeks ago I appeared with her on a panel about her bid to get legal immunity for Big Tech out of the new NAFTA and future trade deals.
But I’m not sure that you’re entirely familiar with my writing if you were blindsided by my opinions on Nancy Pelosi, and particularly on her work in the pandemic. I’ve been chronicling the pandemic and the government reaction every day in my Unsanitized reports, so I’ve been showing my work for some time. And it simply shows that Pelosi has bungled the multitude of opportunities to create and implement and far better response. That has to go back, in my view, to her leadership.
The fact that you have to go back to the first speech Pelosi made in the House—about tackling the AIDS crisis, something I mentioned in the review—to find a core and unwavering principle she expressed on the House floor says much about the relative paucity of them in the 33 intervening years. But Pelosi’s personal beliefs are less important than her work product, of course, and as Speaker, the problem I have is that represents what I would call “silo politics”: an unfocused jumble of at-times contradictory policies that display such a kitchen-sink approach to governing that its effectiveness is dubious. I laid out several examples of that in the article. The fact that she’s on weekly strategy calls with progressive groups speaks to this all-things-to-all-people approach, which ill served the nation during the pandemic.
Here’s one example of the real-world consequences of this lack of coherence. You want to disclaim Pelosi’s participation in the coronavirus response bill known as the CARES Act while also taking credit, as Pelosi does often, for what it included. You say that “Pelosi and the Democrats won a great deal for ordinary working people” in the bill. But its very structure created the conditions that led to the resumption of cases surging across America.
The CARES Act had provisions to keep people out of work (enhanced unemployment) and also provisions to put people back to work (the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP). These work at cross purposes. More important, there was no money to fill in dramatic shortfalls endured by state and local governments. (The $150 billion you refer to could only be used for spending directly related to the crisis, like additional testing and tracing, and the funding is so limited and restricted that states and cities are fighting each other over it.) This created a desperation among governors and mayors to salvage their budgets by prematurely reopening their localities, and when they did, cases started to shoot upward. This “great deal” for working people, in other words, put us at risk.
That is not idle speculation. An analysis of tax revenues and reopening from a political scientist at Marquette University finds that the more a state relies on the individual income tax, the more likely they were to reopen. This uncertainty for state and local government was built into the structure of the bill, and helped induce the crisis we now face. That’s silo politics: a politics that fails to recognize how policies fit together and complement one another, just a mad jumble that can unintentionally harm.
If you think that Pelosi just did the best she could do given the Senate and White House being held in GOP hands, how does this account for her removing automatic stabilizers, triggers that maintain urgent relief for people in a crisis, from the House follow-up bill, the Heroes Act, when the broad spectrum of the caucus wanted them in? There was no GOP resistance to worry about in the Heroes Act, which passed with near-total Democratic support. The denial of the stabilizers was purely a budgetary decision, which is bizarre for a bill that costs $3.5 trillion and wasn’t intended to ever pass into law.
This, too, had a real-world consequence. All of the things you describe as a great deal for working people—the stimulus checks, the unemployment insurance, the PPP—are temporary. Enhanced unemployment is going to run out next week. The PPP only offers eight weeks of payroll relief, and businesses are closing up in record numbers after they’ve exhausted it. There was only one stimulus check. Everyone is scrambling for an additional bill now because of the premature end to these programs from the CARES Act. If you need to pass a second bill with the features of the first to avoid catastrophe, then by definition the first bill was inadequate.
Time-limiting the relief for individuals and small businesses contrasts with the nearly endless power of the corporate money cannon that has driven one of the largest run-ups in corporate stock prices and bank earnings in history. This was the solitary Republican aim, they pursued it and achieved it. Pelosi didn’t have a solitary aim, she threw together a bunch of contrasting policies, and it wasn’t enough.
I should add that the big “get” Pelosi touted from the CARES Act was oversight of the corporate bailout, and yet, 112 days after it passed, she and McConnell still haven’t named a chair of the Congressional Oversight Commission that would fulfill that task. (If you say “well that’s McConnell’s fault,” maybe oversight wasn’t such a great Democratic get, then.) Asked about this at her weekly press conference on Thursday, Pelosi said “there are plenty of people in the military” who could do the job, a job that has nothing to do with the military and is primarily about complicated Federal Reserve procedures. When we needed a bailout oversight chair in 2008 we got Elizabeth Warren; Pelosi wants to appoint a general, four months late.
The moment to pass all of the aspirational measures stuffed into the Heroes Act was in March, when Republicans had something they wanted hanging out there. History suggests that Presidents are punished for bad crisis response; indeed, President Trump’s approval rating is rightfully sinking. Minority-party Democrats would not have been punished by asking for more in March. They should have insisted that any crisis measures remain in place until the end of the crisis, at a minimum.
The idea that the Heroes Act was a “success” belies everything we’re seeing as we wait until the last minute for another crisis bill. Mitch McConnell was able to ignore the Heroes Act because it was a demonstrable fantasy wish list rather than a serious policy. (The idea that there’s been any public pressure for him to adopt it maybe exists on progressive conference calls, but not from where I’m sitting.) He’s writing his own bill, just like he did on the CARES Act. Meanwhile states are growing more desperate—thanks to the lack of CARES Act fiscal relief—and the 30 million-plus unemployed will see the $600 bonus in their checks end next week, just as eviction moratoria end and renters have to worry about being thrown onto the street.
Republicans have devised another corporate giveaway for the next bill: total liability for all corporations whose negligence leads to workers and customers contracting COVID-19. Will Pelosi and the Democrats allow this, after deferring all their priorities in favor of a conservative, corporate-friendly framework on the initial bill? We’ll soon find out.
There’s a strong likelihood that the last two years of Pelosi’s Congressional career will be spent with a Democratic president and Senate. Just as in the last time this happened, it will come amid a brutal economic crisis. It will also open a window for fundamental change. My opinion stands that Pelosi doesn’t have an understanding of what she wants out of that change, and indeed doesn’t believe that sweeping change is possible. I know that Rep. Schakowsky is a top Pelosi lieutenant, and it must be uncomfortable to hear these words. One response would be to unequivocally defend the Speaker. Another would be to try to understand where this disappointment come from, and use your formidable influence with the Speaker to make sure these opportunities are never, ever squandered again. Because the American people cannot withstand another misstep.
David Dayen
Executive Editor
