Those who know Pelosi best say she's no Left Coast liberal zealot. Instead she's a calculating political realist — in her own words, 'reptilian.'
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California speaks at her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill, Friday, Aug. 12, 2022, in Washington.
Longtime allies and observers of the former House speaker say it shouldn’t. This, they say, is who Pelosi has always been.“She is very much a behind-the scenes vote-counting tactician. That’s what she’s good at. She knows how to win,” said Marc Sandalow, the former Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle whose Pelosi biography “attempted to slam the door shutnudged the door back open.
For Pelosi, any consideration of ideology is always tempered by electability. That’s sharply at odds with the caricature that Republicans and conservative media constructed around her during her years as speaker: the embodiment of San Francisco’s lefty politics and out-of-touch elitism. Pelosi’s personal views do tend to run progressive, but her leadership was never rooted in her policy preferences, said John Lawrence, her former chief of staff who now also works at the UC Washington Center.
From her perch in the city’s ritzy Presidio Terrace neighborhood, she still managed to start climbing the rungs of California Democratic political power — first as a fundraiser, then a city party leader, then chair of the California Democratic Party. All the while, she raised five kids. The Burton political machine had dominated local politics for 24 years. Reporter John Jacobs described the made-for-TV-movie scene in his Phillip Burton biography, “A Rage for Justice”:
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