What I got wrong about Nancy Pelosi by mattbai
A pragmatist focuses on getting the best result possible, even if that means changing strategies or giving up on the ideal scenario. The ideologue believes that the principle matters more than winning or losing in the short term.This is a bit too reductive, of course; most politicians would like to be both pragmatic and ideological at the same time. But as years pass, and especially in moments of heated partisanship, they show themselves to be fundamentally one or the other.
Which could mean the 79-year-old Pelosi has evolved as a leader in this, her fourth decade in Congress. But it’s much more likely that Pelosi has been playing the same basic game all along, and I just got it wrong. In other words, most of the Democratic leadership then, like a car with skewed alignment, was pulling inexorably toward the center, even as online activists were demanding a hard turn to the left.
Even then, though, there were signs that Pelosi was a more pragmatic leader than her popular image suggested, if you were looking for them. I remember being surprised to learn, as I sifted through the forensic evidence of Obama’s collapsed budget deal with Republicans in 2011, that Pelosi had privately agreed to support a plan to modestly scale back entitlements and other spending.
“Own the center-left, own the mainstream,” is what Pelosi told the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush earlier this week.
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