Nancy Pelosi | A California liberal who angered communist China

The U.S. House Speaker, face of the Democratic Party for decades, kicked off a diplomatic storm in U.S.-China relations by visiting Taiwan

In November 2018, soon after the mid-term elections when the Democrats regained majority in the House of Representatives, a group of Democrats circulated a letter calling for a change of leadership. The letter thanked Nancy Pelosi — leader of the House Democratic Caucus since 2003 — “for her years of service to our country” and said that “the time has come for new leadership in our Caucus”. Noting that “Democrats ran and won on a message of change”, the signatories said they had promised their voters they will “change the status quo, and we intend to deliver on that promise”.

This represented the first open challenge to Ms. Pelosi’s leadership of the Democratic Party. Yet, the letter did not name an alternative leader. In other words, even those who wanted her gone did not believe they could take her on and win. Hence a fishing expedition of a letter, put out in the hope that Ms. Pelosi would see it, get the message, and perhaps go away on her own. But Ms. Pelosi would not go away. She went on to be reelected as Speaker in January 2019, and again in 2021 for a record fourth time.

Now 82-years-old, Ms. Pelosi — the first woman in American history to lead a party in Congress, and the first woman Speaker of the House — has seen several Presidents come and go. From the time of George W. Bush, through the Barack Obama and Donald Trump Presidencies, there wasn’t a big-ticket legislation that could have made it through Congress without her help. When Mr. Obama had lost all hope of getting his signature Affordable Care Act passed, it was Ms. Pelosi who, as House Speaker, somehow mobilised the numbers to make it happen.

Her skills as a wheeler-dealer adept at floor management came to the fore even when her party was ‘in the Opposition’, as it were — for she could also deploy those skills to frustrate a Republican President, as she did when she repeatedly blocked funding for Mr. Trump’s bid to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. Of course, she is best known for taking on Mr. Trump — both by trolling him regularly, and by getting him impeached, twice. Given that it was a foregone conclusion that Mr. Trump would be acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate, Ms. Pelosi’s handling of the impeachment process was a political master class. She controlled both the timing — she resisted calls from her own party colleagues to launch an impeachment inquiry for the longest time — and the timeline in such a way that Mr. Trump got minimal electoral mileage from it.

How good she really is becomes clear in a comparison with her predecessors from the Republican Party who, despite holding majorities, often failed to get their Bills passed, which rarely, if ever, happened under Ms. Pelosi’s legislature leadership. The Democratic Party is a roiling cauldron of diverse identity, political and interest groups. To get them all to vote together time and again, and also get a few Republicans on board to make up the numbers, is not an easy task, which probably explains her longevity. With her deputies also in their early eighties, two things are clear: the Democrats need a change in leadership, and Ms. Pelosi is not easily replaceable. The 2018 letter was a symptom of this contradiction, and with four years having gone by, the Democrats don’t have much time to resolve it.

In the meantime, there are mid-term elections to deal with and the Democrats’ prospects have looked grim. President Joe Biden’s ratings have plummeted. Ms. Pelosi, the other big face of the Democratic Party, is a liberal from California — one of a kind derisively labelled by the right wing as ‘limousine liberals’, given their penchant for espousing progressive values to the 99% while ensconced in the extreme wealth of the 1%.

Born in 1940 in an influential family — her father Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. was the Mayor of Baltimore and a Congressman — a political career for Ms. Pelosi was always on the cards.  TIME magazine journalist Molly Ball, in her book on Ms. Pelosi writes, “When she first set foot in Capitol’s marble hallways, she was six-year-old Nancy D’Alesandro, a little girl from Baltimore, watching her father get sworn in for his fifth term as a member of Congress.” With an estimated net worth of $135 million, Ms. Pelosi has consistently figured in the list of wealthiest members of Congress. At the same time, she has a long track record of supporting what she describes as “core democratic values”, which include human rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, a measure of social security, and stricter gun control regulations.