Pelosi discusses her new book and Biden’s recent election decision
Nancy Pelosi speaks about her new book, “The Art of Power,” the attack on her husband Paul and Biden dropping out of the 2024 Presidential race.
A perusal of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s travel records over the past half-dozen years or so might give the impression that the Democrat from San Francisco is just one more Californian contemplating a move to Texas.
Her stops included Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Laredo and El Paso. Just in the past three months, she’s been in Texas three times, including for an event in Austin on Tuesday that was part of her ongoing promotion of her new book, “The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman as Speaker of the House.”
A case could be made that no other national Democratic political leader, except perhaps someone running for — or actually holding — the office of president, has been to Texas more often in the years since it has been a Republican stronghold.
Texas is hardly Pelosi Country. A poll by the Texas Politics Project, an arm of the University of Texas, during her second stint at the helm of the House in 2020 showed that her approval rating was a paltry 34%. Her disapproval number was 52%. Even President Joe Biden has had better numbers in the state.
But when Pelosi comes to Texas, it’s not to see if she can put a dent in that 52% number. She’s here for the 34%. And to not so subtly remind them that she has a thing or two in common with a Texas political figure of another era whose shadow and memory have yet to fade from the landscape.
Pelosi’s Texas stop on Tuesday evening was at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library on the UT campus, where she was interviewed by historian Mark Updegrove, the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation.
The conversation was as friendly as the audience inside the auditorium, which included the 36th president’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson and his one-time protégé, former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes. And Updegrove noted that the title of Pelosi’s memoir contained the word “power,” which is the thread that runs through author Robert Caro’s exhaustive four-part biography of LBJ.
Caro is planning a fifth and final treatise on how Johnson’s life was consumed by the accumulation and exercise of power.
Pelosi, who stepped aside as speaker in 2023 but remains in Congress, is widely favored to win her 20th term in the U.S. House next month. On Tuesday, she talked in the interview about the battle to pass the Affordable Care Act when she was speaker during Barack Obama’s years in the White House. And she talked about the harrowing events on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob that wanted to keep defeated President Donald Trump in office attacked the nation’s Capitol and ominously chanted “Where’s Nancy?” once inside.
More: Exclusive: Nancy Pelosi knows the art of power. That couldn’t keep her husband safe.
In describing her own approach to exercising power, she said: “You have to know your why — why you are doing this. You (must) feel very confident of what your purpose is. You make your decision about what you want done, then you do it.”
Pelosi grew up in a political family. Her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was mayor of Baltimore for eight years starting in the late 1940s and was a congressman before that. She recalled that when she first sought a leadership role among House Democrats in 2002, she was more or less told she had business cutting in line while men were waiting their turn.
“Poor babies,” she said with feigned sympathy in her conversation with Updegrove.
At 84, Pelosi is almost 2½ years older than Biden. She opened up somewhat on the effort to persuade the president to end his reelection bid over the summer even though he had all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination. She sidestepped a question about what her exact role was, saying only that the decision was up to the president.
It wasn’t Biden’s age that concerned her, Pelosi said, but instead, “I did not see us on a path to winning.”
As if to prove the point about not coming to Texas to extend olive branches to Republicans, she took pains to limit her references to Trump to “whatshisname” and to affirm her support for Vice President Kamala Harris, who clinched the Democratic nomination for president after Biden stepped aside, in the Nov. 5 election.
When Updegrove asked Pelosi how she hopes to be remembered by historians, she deflected with humor.
“Not so fast on that legacy stuff,” she said.
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Publish date : 2024-10-13 01:18:00
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