Pelosi review: the speaker, her rise and how she came to rent space in Donald Trump's brain

From her perch as speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has bested Donald Trump in budget battles, mocked him at the State of the Union and won an outsized place in his brain. Now Molly Ball of Time magazine delivers a biography that does justice to the most powerful woman in American history: well-researched, a smooth read that goes back to the beginning.

Ball traces Pelosi’s rise from a childhood in Baltimore, the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr, a Democratic mayor and former congressman. Pelosi’s politics were shaped by the New Deal, the Depression, the Catholic church and the city’s cacophonous tapestry. Think ethnic reductionism leavened by transactionalism. Good government was not an end in itself.

The young Pelosi was privy to the needs of her father’s constituents but also to the frustrations of Annunciata Lombardi D’Alesandro, her immigrant mother. As Ball makes clear, her ambition was thwarted for the sake of family and her husband.

“Big Tommy’s” career came to a halt after a criminal investigation, an unsuccessful bid for the US Senate and a failed comeback at city hall. When their mother died, Pelosi’s brother Tommy, like their father a former Baltimore mayor, called their mother the “really true politician of the family”.

While politics was part of Pelosi’s upbringing, her own entrance came later. Soon after college she married Paul Pelosi, an aspiring banker. Unlike other rich legislators such as Dianne Feinstein, Kelly Loeffller and Mitch McConnell, Pelosi’s money is seldom a source of headlines.

The pair moved to New York and then to San Francisco. By the time Pelosi turned 30, in 1970, she was the mother of five children. The speaker’s gavel was not on the horizon. But within a decade, life would change.

As a young mother with a penchant for books, San Francisco’s libraries were a natural destination. In Ball’s telling, one day Joseph Alioto, the mayor, called Pelosi and asked if she was “‘making a big pot of pasta e fagioli?’” An obnoxious question, in Ball’s view, but dinner was not Alioto’s point. He wanted to appoint Pelosi to the public library commission.

After Pelosi said she enjoyed volunteering, Alioto pushed back. His take was simple: if “you’re doing the work … you should get official recognition for it”. Later, Pelosi came to view the call as a feminist-minded assist from an unexpected source.

Pelosi emerged as a bridge between rival Democratic factions. She also offered a roadmap to California governor Jerry Brown’s run for president in 1976. When Brown won the Maryland primary he thanked Pelosi as the “architect” of his campaign. At that point, Pelosi “was more than a housewife, more than a pocketbook, more than a hostess”, in Ball’s words. “She was a strategist.”

In 1981, Pelosi became chair of the California Democratic party and embarked on a voter registration drive that added 700,000 to the electoral rolls. She successfully pushed for San Francisco as the site of the 1984 Democratic convention, and along the way had a brush with Feinstein, then mayor of the City by Bay. She thought the cost excessive.

Following the death of Representative Sala Burton, the wife of legendary congressman Phil Burton, Pelosi was elected to the US House in 1987. There, she “gravitated toward the ‘hard’ committees” like appropriations and intelligence, the “ones that did work traditionally seen as masculine: dollars and cents, war and peace”. Early on, Pelosi understood where actual power and influence resided.

As a congresswoman, Pelosi did her homework. She raised money, collected chits and made friends in unexpected places. The late John Murtha, a gruff congressman and ex-marine from Pennsylvania’s God and guns country, became an ally. The two had sat on the appropriations committee, which Murtha chaired.

When George W Bush’s “mission accomplished” moment degenerated into a mordant fiasco, Murtha became Pelosi’s point person in attacking the Iraq war. To her credit, Pelosi was mindful of the potency of culture in politics, that her home district was not a mirror image of the US. Murtha was a more effective attack dog than the left’s usual suspects.

Pelosi is an unabashed liberal. But she is also an institutionalist, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee until she was elected minority leader in 2006. These days, Adam Schiff, another Californian by choice, chairs the committee.

When it came to impeachment Pelosi moved slowly, and discounted the trigger-happy voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad”. Instead, she pivoted on the issue when seven first-term “security” Democrats, who had served in the military or intelligence, penned a Washington Post op-ed calling for impeachment proceedings.

Four of the seven had refused to vote for Pelosi as speaker. Swing-district America weighed on Pelosi’s calculus.

There are sentiments and then there is unvarnished math. Pelosi is by far a more adroit vote-counter than Paul Ryan or John Boehner, the past two Republican speakers. She is better at it than her own whip team, as Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, can attest.

Pelosi’s weaknesses are delivering a set speech and the Sunday morning talkshows. That doesn’t seem so serious next to Newt Gingrich, the speaker who led the impeachment charge against Bill Clinton and resigned in disgrace. For that matter Denny Hastert, Gingrich’s successor, eventually went to prison for covering-up hush money payments to former students he had sexually abused.

Pelosi is the one politician to repeatedly humble Trump in front of national audiences. She exudes competence, avoids scandal and has earned the gratitude and loyalty of her caucus. Her rise and return to the speakership were anything but inevitable. That’s what makes her story worth telling, and Ball is definitely up to the task.