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.
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The Nature of Leadership and Power
The Art of Power is a memoir that reflects the intricacies of wielding power. Pelosi states that her philosophy of power is rooted in strong ideological commitments, power-sharing, and ethics. Throughout the memoir, Pelosi seeks to examine the nature of leadership and power as she has experienced it throughout her long career.
As a progressive Democrat from one of the most liberal Congressional districts in the country, Pelosi believes in the power of government to do good in the lives of ordinary people. She represents herself as wielding power on behalf of those who have none—e.g., children, the poor, Chinese dissident students, and people in countries that lack democratic traditions. Her instrument for wielding this power is institutional—Congress—so she spends large parts of the text praising the institution for what it enables her to do on behalf of the powerless. For example, she highlights her efforts to pass legislation to “insulate Main Street from Wall Street” (160) by augmenting TARP, which initially had greater benefits for banks and executives.
Pelosi’s power is also one rooted in power-sharing and teamwork. While there are moments when she engages in self-promotion, she more often gives credit to her peers in the House and to her constituents. Pelosi includes long lists of people who contributed to the passage of legislation. A part of her theory of power is that ordinary Americans can have a substantial impact if people with power give them a platform. There are multiple references to activists, such as when Pelosi recounts the role activist Cleve Jones played in using the AIDS quilt to raise awareness about the disease.
One of the most important ideas Pelosi advances about power is that it must be wielded ethically. This idea dominates her chapters on China and in every discussion about Donald Trump. In the chapter on China, she takes the US and multiple administrations (including some Democratic ones, despite her partisanship) to task for their decision to let profit trump ethics and moral authority. She uses her power as a legislator to counter that tendency.
Wielding power ethically can also mean speaking truth to power. The photos of Pelosi holding a banner in Tiananmen Square and wagging a finger at Donald Trump in the Oval Office are ones that portray her as uncompromising even when confronting people who have more power than she does. When she does explicitly attack figures in the book, it is generally because of their failure to use their power ethically. Her harsh descriptions of Trump—that he is selfish, a liar, an impossible partner when it comes to negotiations—are all rooted in her belief that to be a leader requires wielding power on behalf of the interests of others.
The Challenges of Navigating Gender Norms
Pelosi was arguably one of the most powerful women in the United States when she was Speaker of the House, the third person in the line of succession behind the president. In both the subtitle of the book and the early chapters, Pelosi addresses the challenges of navigating gender norms in her quest for power and in her personal life, portraying herself as someone who combines traditionally feminine roles with her successful political career.
In a world in which women are still underrepresented in the halls of power, part of Pelosi’s task is to make a woman wielding power look natural. One way Pelosi manages that is by linking personal values traditionally associated with femininity—care for others, including children—to wielding political power. Beginning in the Preface, Pelosi presents her love of children as a chief motivator for her entry into, and persistence in, politics. Being a politician, she suggests, is simply a widening of the scope of what she can do to protect and nurture children.
Pelosi also portrays her ascent as a progression arising from a longstanding tradition of women being ambitious on behalf of themselves and other women. During the meeting with George W. Bush, she describes her sense that the room around her wasn’t so much crowded by men as it was with the spirits of “the great women’s rights activists and leaders Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, and Alice Paul” (6). When Pelosi invokes her political foremothers, she is presenting her ambition as a force with a traceable history and her ambition for other women as the natural extension of that tradition of women paying it forward.
Pelosi builds on that lineage by embracing the idea of women helping women. Early in the book, she gives a detailed account of how female politicians such as Lindy Bogg and Sala Bart taught her to own her power because that was what she needed to do in order to truly be powerful and maintain motivation during times of challenge. Pelosi fully credits these women for making her career possible. When Pelosi went to Congress, she continued this tradition, noting that during her years of big influence, she played a key role in helping the number of women in Congress go from 12 in 1987 to 94 in 2024.
Finally, Pelosi relies on personal detail and anecdotes to show her utilizing traditional gender roles to further her political ambitions. Pelosi variously represents herself as a legislator who learned the value of home as a daughter at the knees of her parents, a politician who knows how to use food to encourage other politicians to engage in or break off negotiations, and a wife/mother who is protective of her family. Pelosi is ultimately making the argument that her life experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother of five make her a better politician, not a worse one.
The Dynamics of Political Negotiation and Conflict
Pelosi is proud of the work she has done, and The Art of Power is in part an effort to burnish her reputation. The lessons she offers in the book include that one must be willing to engage in conflict to win negotiations and that one must use one’s knowledge of the law and human nature to negotiate ably. She offers various episodes from her own career to illustrate the dynamics of political negotiation and conflict.
Pelosi says early on that she always shares a paraphrase with would-be powerful women, namely, that “when you’re in the arena, you have to be able to take a punch, and sometimes you have to be able to throw a punch” (7). Pelosi throws plenty of punches as she negotiates. She does so through dramatic gestures like unfurling a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square, ripping up Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, and giving interviews with the media about matters currently under negotiation.
For example, when the George W. Bush administration was headed toward war in Iraq, Pelosi used the media to share a counter-message that the intelligence she had did not support such an action. Although she didn’t win the argument, she and her caucus forced Congress to re-examine just what their role was in restraining the president’s use of the War Powers Act. When it looked like she wouldn’t be able to find enough common ground across the aisle to get the ACA passed, she turned out “grassroots support for the Affordable Care Act” (51), resulting in pressure that did not work on Republicans but did work on her Democratic peers.
Pelosi also presents herself as an able negotiator who does her homework, giving her the knowledge she needs to gain concessions and shape the course of legislation. During the negotiations over the Affordable Care Act—which she sees as her crowning legislative achievement—she used every bit of her knowledge about reconciliation to get the job done. She also made a point to know just what levers would work on people with whom she was negotiating, whether that knowledge had to do with eating habits or important relationships she could use to influence the person. For example, she called on a Catholic clergyman to wrangle a Democratic congressman who feared voting for the ACA. Food and relationships with Catholic priests aren’t part of her constitutional/institutional powers, but they are nevertheless key to her well-honed ability to negotiate.
One lesson Pelosi consistently offers is that negotiation can happen between people who disagree, but it cannot happen between people who have no common set of values. This is one of the key issues she has with the administration of George W. Bush and with President Donald Trump. She argues that the fallout from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were much more devastating than they needed to be because the Bush administration negotiated in bad faith and lied to the American people. When she takes Donald Trump to task, it is in part because she believes he is capricious and has “disregard both for the fundamentals of the law and for basic rules” (245). Thus, Pelosi argues that negotiators have to agree on the ethical framework for their negotiation to make any real progress.
