53 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy PelosiThe Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaPart 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Leadership to Meet Domestic Challenges”
Part 4, Chapter 5 Summary: “We Won’t Have an Economy on Monday”
Nancy Pelosi describes the instrumental role of Congress, especially Democrats, in saving the economy during the economic crisis of 2007. As soon as she heard rumblings of trouble on Wall Street, she contacted Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury in the George W. Bush administration. She criticized the fact that she had to reach out to him, not the other way around. Pelosi goes into detail to explain the root causes of the crisis— namely greed, dishonesty on the part of banks, predatory lending, and deregulation of the banking and securities industries.
Pelosi sprang into action and began work with the administration on legislation to save the economy. The cost was a staggering $400 billion, according to Paulson. He wanted to have the government buy up the toxic assets that were bankrupting the banks and securities firms, while Pelosi and the Democrats instead wanted to try capitalization, which Pelosi explains means purchasing shares in the troubled firms. Any plan would require Congress to appropriate funds. Paulson also believed that including caps on executive salaries in the legislation would never succeed. Pelosi’s goals were to hold banks accountable and to “insulate Main Street from Wall Street” (160).
When Paulson sought to give himself almost unlimited power to distribute funds to banks, Pelosi pushed back because she took the role of Congressional oversight seriously. Then-presidential candidate John McCain called a meeting and offered input but no plan, while candidate Barack Obama’s suggestions were “thoughtful adjustments” (167). After much back-and-forth and continued damage to the economy, Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Plan (TARP). Pelosi and the Democrats only addressed concerns about ordinary Americans with the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passage of which happened after Democrats took control of both Houses of Congress and the White House.
The aftermath of the crisis and the Congressional response is complex. The Democrats passed reforms to rein in banks and executives, but those rules are now watered down due to a Republican appetite for deregulation. As usual, greedy banks have sought to “privatize the gains and nationalize the risks” (179). Backlash to the role of Democrats in what many perceived to be a bailout and lack of accountability for executives led to the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street Movement, the rise of the anti-regulation political movement called the Tea Party, and even greater polarization of politics.
Pelosi points out that her concern was always for ordinary homeowners, both because she believes “homeownership is vital to building strong communities” (180), and because it is in her political DNA as the child of a political family in which both parents championed housing for all. In the end, Pelosi believes “the financial crisis sprang from the Bush administration’s fundamental failure to regulate and supervise financial systems” (180).
Part 4, Chapter 6 Summary: “Healthcare is a Right—Not a Privilege”
Pelosi recounts her pivotal role as Speaker of the House during the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially known as “Obamacare.” She describes the dire state of healthcare before Obamacare. She did the work because she knew how important healthcare was to ordinary Americans. Her commitment to health justice—the belief that healthcare is a human right—was deeply influenced by witnessing the healthcare struggles of her San Francisco constituents during the AIDS crisis.
Following through on a campaign promise after his election, President Barack Obama told Congress to pass healthcare legislation. In a departure from tradition, Obama allowed the House, not the White House, to draft the legislation. From the beginning, getting the legislation passed was a rocky process, with conservative Senate members and hesitant House colleagues slowing progress, proof of the House dictum that “Republicans are our opposition, but the Senate is our enemy” (199).
The bill’s passage required Pelosi to employ all her knowledge of legislative processes. She shares how she had to wrangle the more conservative Senate, wobbly House members, and the White House itself to move the ACA forward. She takes pride in her role, noting, for example, that she was glad to “say with some immodesty that [her] years on the Appropriations Committee enabled [her] to address key concerns” (221) during one sticky moment in the negotiations. Pelosi says Italians like her believe food is central to community, so she even used meals to make members of Congress happy enough to continue with grueling work sessions.
Pelosi also recounts overhearing wavering House members remark on her strong-arm tactics, which she used to ensure their votes. She called on a Catholic clergyman with whom she had a personal relationship, asking and getting his agreement to call a wavering Congressman to shore up support for passing the bill. Even President Obama occasionally needed pressure, as he still sincerely believed he could get Republicans to vote for the legislation. She dismisses Republican claims that House Democrats hadn’t read the bill before voting, calling it a smear tactic that ignores the extended reading sessions she required members to attend.
Republicans and the insurance industry spent millions of dollars in dark money—money without openly declared sources—campaigns, a practice enabled by the Citizens United v. FEC (2010) Supreme Court decision (See: Index of Terms), to attack the bill. House members who supported the ACA faced unprecedented, in-your-face vitriol from misinformed voters. Pelosi laments the “new level of venom” (224) in political activism that emerged during this time, but she credits grassroots organizers and ordinary people for helping make the ACA’s passage possible.
Despite the historic nature of the bill, many Democrats subsequently lost their seats, and Republicans regained control of Congress and the White House, riding a wave of animus toward the ACA. When Donald Trump won the 2016 election for president, Republican Speaker Paul Ryan tried to repeal the ACA using underhanded tactics, but failed because he lacked the votes. Pelosi notes that “the Speaker should only bring a bill to the floor when he ha[s] the votes—not simply on that anniversary [of the ACA’s passage in 2010] when [she] had the votes” (234).
Pelosi thanks all the allies who collaborated on the bill and subsequent changes to the law, noting that while Obama’s commitment during negotiations was key, Biden made the ACA even more effective during his early years as president due to his lifetime of skills spent working on behalf of ordinary, working-class Americans. She concludes with a speech excerpt from a woman who thanked Pelosi for her dedication to children, describing it as the driving force behind Pelosi’s work on the ACA.
Part 4 Analysis
In these two chapters, Pelosi leans into the conventions of the political memoir (See: Background) while exploring The Dynamics of Political Negotiation and Conflict. She advances progressive, Democratic ideology and relies on self-promotion to burnish her legacy. While Pelosi spent the previous section on matters related to her work internationally, in this section she shifts to talking about domestic legislation. She presents such legislation as rooted in the idea that government has a positive and substantive role to play in the lives of ordinary Americans.
Pelosi uses her discussion of what she sees as two domestic crises—the economic recession of 2008 and the rising cost and lack of access to healthcare—to make the case for the Democratic Party’s agenda. Pelosi offers up the Democratic response to the recession as a case study in how to wield power during times of crisis with swiftness and decisiveness. On the other hand, she represents the Republican response as an example of what happens when a party refuses to use the levers of power to help ordinary people.
Pelosi sets up this contrast between active Democrats and obstructive, inept Republicans from the first when she describes with some irritation the fact that it was she who had to reach out to the George W. Bush administration to get definitive information on the economic crisis. She even extends this characterization to the presidential candidates at that time, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. Reading between the lines of her description of the two candidates’ contributions to the TARP legislation, it sounds as if neither man had much to add to the discussion. Nevertheless, Pelosi is especially dismissive of what little McCain had to say about the legislation and treats Obama’s small contributions as “thoughtful adjustments” (167). Pelosi’s characterization of the two men is thus openly partisan.
Pelosi also discredits an important element of contemporary Republican ideology: Deregulation designed to keep government out of the way of businesses. In sketching out the causes of the crisis, Pelosi is careful to show how deregulation contributed to the crisis and that the costs fell most heavily on ordinary people. When she describes her thwarted efforts to “insulate Main Street from Wall Street” (160) during the crisis, she places the blame at the feet of the republicans and credits the Obama administration and House Democrats with the legislative remedy.
All in all, Pelosi represents Democrats as the voice of the average citizen and Republicans as the voice of the big banks and other corporate interests, which means that she does not address the issue of corporate backers and lobbying that exist within the Democratic party as well.
Another important element of political memoir is justification of the writer’s actions to protect their legacy. Pelosi gives TARP and the ACA pride of place in her legislative accomplishments, but she is aware that neither of these laws did Democrats any favors when it came to getting re-elected. She admits as much but places the blame not on Democratic overreach, but on dark money and Republicans who misled voters about the contents of the law and the process of passing it. Pelosi attempts to protect her legacy when she explains away Republicans’ accusations that Democratic members of Congress didn’t even read the text of the ACA before passing it.
Pelosi frequently uses “we” language to describe legislative accomplishments in order to give credit to House Democrats and her party in general. Nevertheless, she also expressly claims individual credit to bolster her legacy. She does this in two ways: Explicitly praising herself, and incorporating the language of others. At one moment, she claims with “some immodesty” (221) that she was a capable negotiator because of her years of experience as a legislator. This is humor at work, but it is also a tricky piece of rhetoric that speaks to The Challenges of Navigating Gender Norms. Her rhetorical tactics show her awareness that women are frequently expected to be modest—which is especially a problem for a politician, since part of being a successful wielder of power is getting credit for one’s work.
Another moment of “immodesty” comes when she uses biting humor to laugh at Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s attempts to repeal the ACA because he wanted the optics of striking down the law near the anniversary of its passage. Pelosi mocks Ryan’s inability to count votes—one of the key skills the Speaker of the House needs. The message here is that she did the hard work that a man could not do. She takes the credit here, but in a subsequent passage embraces a more traditionally feminine role by explaining how she fed or starved legislators to impact the pace of negotiations. Pelosi’s self-inscription in these moments shows that one can be both traditionally feminine and powerful at the same time.
Pelosi also relies on the words of others to shore up her legacy and justify her actions. Her description of overhearing members complain about her strong-arm tactics during the ACA negotiations highlights that she was ruthless when required—but she gets to do so without explicitly saying that about herself. Another instance of this kind of praise from the mouths of others occurs near the end of the chapter on the ACA. Pelosi includes an excerpt from the speech of a woman, in which the woman credits Pelosi for her work on the ACA and links it to Pelosi’s commitment to protecting children. Pelosi thus wishes to present herself as an able legislator who manages to be both ruthless and caring at the same time. The very act of threading that needle between immodesty and necessary self-promotion is a key skill for wielding the art of power.
