I work for politics and prose. Thank you for joining us in our online format for the author events. Please click the green button below we are offering five dollars sales we need the purchases to keep the program going. You can ask the author a question by clicking ask a question on the bottom of your screen and also read other peoples questions. The author host and audience members and onto the main event. And then to draw on exclusive interviews and the legislative accomplishments. And with the impeachment. Welcome. Now we have 420 people. And everyone in the audience. This is a really great book may be like a day and a half i read it and off line before you could see it its a pleasurable beach read and to learn about and one of the consequential people of the centuries and to have a document that we need to know about nancy pelosi. I have a million questions and there is a way do you want to start . I am a huge admirer and i appreciate you doing this. Youve never written about before and this is your first. And you ever these triumphant stories. And to someone thats never done it before. And to meet the expectations. I was totally miserable. I would not recommend it. It reminded me of childbirth in the sense how excruciating it would be and i sure. And this is really hard. And i feel sorry for myself but its hard to write about. But to be active in politics and making it difficult to finish the book. And then the impeachment was getting underway. So definitely fulfilling. So looking at politics day in and day out and the things you start to feel you are understanding and those dimensions of american politics. So for us to bring that together with years and years of reporting and writing of women in politics in the way Congress Works and those willing to put in the magazine. What you say about nancy pelosi would be of however long . Honestly out of all of the political figures the one that felt big enough for a book. And then could take that deep of a dive into her. I was assigned to profile her for Time Magazine in 2017. I didnt think she was at interesting frankly but once i got in there. And thinking about her and the themes and characteristics of her career that there are a lot of layers to unpack. And the stuff people dont know about her. And then coming up with a book to write and then you just have to be obsessed with that. Always a great person. So part of this was in the end she doesnt speak offthecuff that much did use separate how difficult the nut to crack that you can actually crack it with the magazine stor story. Yes. It is interesting because so much politics is about communication. And with that great political or a tour of our age. And to be thoughtful. And to be robotic politicians. And to say the wrong thing and then to answer any questions because to be engaged in public introspection. And then they also talk about personal anecdotes and there is an absence of that for public speaking. So it is an occasion for me to request the role of communication politics and to think about what is the relationship. Everythins and what shes going to get out of whatever the interaction is a. Shes much more interested than she is in making you like her or making herself feel good or making an audience abroad. Its about what is that im trying to communicate here and how many times do i have to repeat it for you to get the message . Its a great point i interviewed cortez whenever interviewed before and its kind of a shadow of nancy pelosi in some ways a. Shes very vulnerable and open to wonder if you had any occasion to see nancy pelosi do vulnerability at all and i wondered if she ever let herself just wondering what it feels like in some ways what she would let you see about what its like to be a tactically she is, targeted the way she is, mischaracterized the shes a wouldnt say that i got a sense of vulnerability that she let her guard down enough to get a little snippy with me which was nice like she finally felt like i think the generation she comes from born in 1940, shes not eatingyearsold and comes from a much more of a formal air a particularly for women and as you have eluded to as well, you cant separate her the way she carries herself from how she has been treated and turned into this bogeyman as literally republicans need to activate coad called attack of the 50 pelosi where she is a giant stomping on people. When you are the subject of that kind of an onslaught you do sort of build yourself a renowned for her toughness and discipline and i think that a lot of that comes from just refusing to be vulnerable in public and to let anyone ever see her sweater. Do you have any sense that there is a any element of Todays Republican Party that she feels she can have some kind of good faith dealing with . Shes been dealing a lot with the popular blue state governors have been on the frontlines of the response and i recently profiled the governor and hes someone that has gotten to know nancy pelosi a little bit. So i think she is one of these and you hear this a lot from democrats these days like i miss the old Republican Party back when they were nice and gentle and you could deal with them. She was literally born into the Democratic Party. Theres never been any doubt about her partisan loyalties and she describes her upbringing that way, it was the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party where she came from and there is an amazing anecdote early in the book where she just moved to california with her husband, they had four Young Children and they would soon have another they just moved from San Francisco where she knows nobody and is staying with her motherinlaw which is pretty unpleasant for everyone involved, not that they didnt get along but i dont think anyone wants to live with their mother in law for a long time and they finally find the perfect place. Its got a yard and play set. As they are about to sign the papers i think, literally turns to the owner and says why are you renting out your house and they say we are moving to washington my husband is accepting a job in the Nixon Administration and she turns to the real estate representative and says we are not taking it. I refuse to live in a house made available by the election of nixon but shes accomplished a lot of things its much more about knowing what your convictions are and where you come from and then understanding where the other side is coming from to try to find a way to meet somewhere in the middle that satisfies both parties and it isnt about can she go get a drink. Shes not a politician like the democratic leader in the senate and the connection between human beings. That is the way her politics were. Shes more about counting votes and doing those deals. Host what is your sense of what she cares about in these stimulus negotiations . Democrats are talking all the time about vote by mail protections and making sure whatever happens in november is safe on the level and so forth and it you dont see the leverage that nancy pelosi now has so how might be his next round of negotiations go given how important those issues seem to be . Guest she is always on this i think is fair to say. Shes not pulling out enough and then republicans are calling her obstructionists for not immediately getting everything they want so shes got to balance those demands and what you see is she recognizes the urgency of the moment and knows that it has to happen fast and that is hard in a congress as gridlock and acrimonious as this one but she also feels they were put in charge for a reason and deserve a seat at the table so in the early round these negotiations with the trillion dollar bills theyve been passing there was an attempt to go around and cut her out to have what they call the four corner negotiations and she said what, i need to be at that table and im willing to be reasonable and give up some of my initial demands but i need to be at that table so that is what shes trying to balance. She is trying to balance. Some of the things youve referenced thats something a lot of republican and Democratic Leaders are squawking about right now and i think she calculated in the last round of negotiations bu that it would become politically impossible to continue to deny that funding so we do see initially Mitch Mcconnell take the position that they were not going to bail out the state because they were not responsible enough to put billions of dollars aside for a once in a century pandemic and i think she realized that we are seeing it happen it became unattainable because a lot of now even republican senators and members are saying my state needs this, we cant just say no to this. Host do you have the sense that he her power was out for frontend within the caucus . I guess the last time would have been 2017. Guest 2016 but not 2018. Host do you have the sense that other than going back and forth between the majority and minority she was never threatened from inside of the caucus . Guest there was a fair amount of angst about her leadership during those years in the minority which were thankless a lot of House Democrats were very frustrated that they had the same leaders are 13, 15, 17 years and they are now in their upper 70s, early 80s and a lot of people thought it was time for a fresh face and personal ambition and that that sort of post and fair to all the members and also because she had been the subject of so many attacks and they have spenhadto spend hundreds of milf dollars i think at this point in turning her into this bogeyman that she had become toxic and the sort of republican leaning districts who needed to keep their seats to get the majority and so the feeling was if she wasnt there to be the subject of those attacks there would be better politics that the democrats. What you didnt really hear is i think somebody else could do a better job managing th of manage house, somebody else could do a better job shaping these complex pieces of legislation. That was never the appeal of the challenger in 2016 or others who defend him against her but tried to oust her from the speakership in 2018 it was never what she sees about her job as legislating that it wa but it wf the external factors. Is it conceivable they could keep the same Leadership TeamGoing Forward and have someone of equal age showing the white house again i think this is a crystal ball question but is this the last for the team . Guest i have a firm policy against making predictions. I dont think that its been previously reported back in 2018 there was that leadership race where she worked hard to diffuse this. When it came to the vote on the house floor to she has to win over almost everyone in that sort of ideologically diverse caucus so one of the conditions that she finally accepted to make the deal she agreed three term limit. Basically it said she could serve no more than two more terms. She walked into the next one and says i wasnt giving anything away because i signed on to stay for one term anyway. It does reveal that at least at the time and this also by the way i thought about negotiating tactics and this is one of her great tactics is to pretend its terribly painful to get something up that actually you are not giving up at all because you either didnt mind or you didnt want it in the first place there is various points in the book you see her in these negotiating postures where she pretends she is giving up something terribly painful when actually shes not. Host as im watching this master negotiator [inaudible] i think it has. A lot of these tactics came from her experience as a mother as someone who had five children in six years and who by all accounts ran an extremely disciplined household as a friend once said she knew she was destined. Ii am not there yet with my the kids, but if you think about it, toddlers and politicians a lot in common they are narcissistic. But if you can make them feel like theyre ego is being boosted you can get them to do what they want and i do feel like some of these negotiating tactics that ive learned do come in handy. Another one i like is the name your price where you say to someone what do i have to do and they name a price that they think is outlandish or impossible to. If you can find a way then you can do it and she says fine and she gets the volunteers to stand around and every 20 minutes they flip it over so the grass can breed and they have no choice but to say we didnt think you could satisfy the condition that you did so you can do what you want to. Host you mentioned she represented San Francisco and that is an issue that is very close to her given where she represented a lot of people she knows and shes been around for a while. Mitch mcconnell has actually talked in some ways about the outbreak and reminding him of his own experience with polio during the polio outbreak when he was growing up. Are there any echoes at all do you think about what we are living through now and also this sort of uncertainty and just this out of control new and scary disease that can be very fatal, but its just taking over everything . I wonder if this is something youve ever heard her talk about or if you have seen the parallels . Guest i havent heard of it and she said in the past few bits one of the parallels frankly the republican president at the time was slow to acknowledge the extent of the crisis and that is something we have seen play out abundantly it took years for president reagan to even say so and big part of what she was a part of working with advocates in the community and other members that cared about the issue, she wasnt alone but one of the things she had to do first before she could get help from the victims of the crisis was to convince everybody on both ends of the spectrum but it was a proble problem that hae dealt with, that the federal government had to grapple with and so one of the things that she did early on was to nail a book to every constituent in her district the Surgeon General sort of information, just to get that information out there and then the federal government ended up doing the same thing shortly thereafter to hundreds of millions of households so people understood. In november the democrats keep the house, nancy pelosi stays on as speaker and donald trump is re elected. Lets say the senate goes to 5050. Do you see anything salvageable in this relationship that could actually make a those most powerful figures, do you think they could deal with each other so they dont have to get reelected again do you see anything happening . Guest i doubt it only because of the personal relationship. They havent spoken in months and its because trump is mad at her for impeaching him. Shes much more coldblooded about these things. She doesnt have her personal feelings aside whether or not shes going to deal with someone policy and i think it is fair to say the president is not so she spent a lot of time trying to negotiate with him on infrastructure. This is something my donald trump talks about building roads and bridges he kind of sound like a democrat. He wants to build lots of stuff and she kept coming to the negotiating table until he walked away. He was the one who spent his hands down on the table in the middle and say i cant talk to you as long as this witchhunt is going on. So he was willing to deal and she was continued the policy negotiations even as the impeachment and investigations were underway but the president was not so as long as the president is going to theres nothing she can do about that. She does want people to know not to run out of control of the left wing of the party but to be sensible and get things done so this is part of why she continues to stay we would do a bill on prescription drugs. There are areas of commonality to the negotiations it is fair to say or not ongoing. Host im going to proceed. Could you refresh your browser backs i can still see and hear every one fine. I am getting a little bit of feedback is all. Sorry, everybody, we will have it back up and running quickly. Host there you are. There were certainly some more aggressive members who wanted a moved early on. What was it that brought her around . Was at the facts of the case or Something Else or did she feel she had no choice given where the caucus was . Guest she felt it had to be done and particularly the vulnerable members would agree that they had moved to. She didnt like the suggestion that she caved or was following rather than leading that it is fair to say she always thought of as a point person to prevent you have to remember she lived through the clinton impeachment which she thought was a joke, she thought it was basically a political persecution on the part of a Republican Party that just really for class reasons didnt see bill clinton as a legitimate president and then when she first became speaker in 2007 she faced a constant drumbeat from the left to impeach president bush is so she had code pink protesters every day camped out in her yard in San Francisco and an activist actually ran against her in a primary over this unwillingness to impeach president bush so it wasnt as loud a drumbeat as we had the past couple of years but that was another experience that formed her to stay i didnt get into it then. I think she felt the same way and still does. I think she looks at it now and says we have to do that, the president forced us to do it because of his misconduct but what did it accomplish. If you care about results above everything you really dont see the point of something that you know isnt going to remove the president , you know its not going to achieve anything tangible. She says in politics you have to know why and hers is the children, the children so she is always going to look at any particular problem and say hell does this feed a hungry child or improve the lives of workers somewhere or human rights around the world and all the impeachment did in her view was put on a sort of divisive show that this doesnt publish anything. I think she does feel the one thing that it accomplished this in the history books she will always say he has been impeached and cant do anything to change that but other than that she does feel it wa that was kind of pointless. Host do you think she has regrets about this . Guest she isnt a person that has regrets. She says i dont do that. Host has she always had a personal fondness president bush was someone she used to call a gentleman all the time and still does. They had some moments that she remembers they seem to have something its no if not a workg relationship at the time it was at least friendly. Is there anything about donald trump but she has any use or respect for . Guest no, i dont think so. And agai