Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden reached the dizzying heights of the United States presidency.
But the most powerful Democratic leader of the first quarter of the 21st century is Nancy Pelosi.
The former House speaker has officially retired as Washington’s top Democrat. But she was back moving her chess pieces again in recent weeks, as the critical player who at first subtly, and then forcefully, pushed President Joe Biden aside after she judged that he could no longer beat ex-President Donald Trump in November. If Vice President Kamala Harris pulls off a victory against the Republican nominee in November, it will count as Pelosi’s most audacious political triumph yet.
The California Democrat wasn’t elected to Congress until she was 47 – she had spent the previous two decades bringing up her five kids – but she had politics in her bones as the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., a congressman and mayor of Baltimore.
She shattered a glass ceiling in becoming the first woman speaker after leading Democrats to a majority in the midterm elections in 2006 and was instrumental in stifling Republican President George W. Bush’s power in his final two years and preparing the way for the first Black president, Barack Obama.
If it wasn’t for Pelosi, Obama would never have passed his signature domestic accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. The speaker threaded the narrowest of political needles to get it done. When Donald Trump shocked Democrats by winning the presidency in 2016, Pelosi became his most effective countering force in Washington – and led Democrats back to control of the House in 2018 and reclaimed the speaker’s gavel.
Pelosi’s efforts led to Trump’s two impeachments, a stain in history no other president has suffered. And she again marshaled a restive Democratic coalition as speaker to secure Biden’s critical early legislative achievements, managing her caucus with expertise in the first two years of his term, before Democrats again lost the House.
Pelosi still represents her California district and, as a prolific fundraiser and behind-the-scenes political strategist, she’s been working to try to ensure that her heir, Hakeem Jeffries, becomes the first Black speaker with Democrats hoping to win back the House in November. The fear that objective could be drowned by Biden’s unpopularity was surely one of the reasons that Pelosi was so active in leading a weekslong pressure campaign to get him to step aside. And she also recognized that everything she had accomplished in two spells as speaker was at risk from an extreme Trump second term and a Republican Congress that would do nothing to restrain him.
It is a mark of her aura that everyone in Washington --- including Biden – understood that when Pelosi has made up her mind, she’s almost impossible to resist.
