Nancy Pelosi, Just Scratching The Surface

By Ruth Marcus,
who is a columnist and editorial writer for The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 6, 2008

KNOW YOUR POWER

A Message to America's Daughters

By Nancy Pelosi with Amy Hill Hearth

Doubleday. 180 pp. $23.95

MADAM SPEAKER

Nancy Pelosi's Life, Times, and Rise to Power

By Marc Sandalow

Modern Times. 300 pp. $25.95

Newly moved to San Francisco in 1969, bunking at her mother-in-law's with four small children, Nancy Pelosi found the perfect house after months of desperate searching. She was ecstatic, until she learned that the rental had become available only because the owner was moving to Washington to work in the Nixon administration.

End of deal. Back to Nana's.

This story appears in two new books about the first female speaker of the House, neither of which does a terribly good job at grappling with the implications of its spite-your-face partisanship. Pelosi tells the story on herself in the slight (in every sense of the word) "Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters." You might think, with the wisdom of hindsight, that her message to America's daughters would be to clear out of the in-laws', politics be damned.

Nope. "Our daughter, Alexandra, who hadn't been born yet, often says to me that she knows everything she needs to know about me by hearing that story," Pelosi writes proudly.

The far, far better "Madam Speaker" by Marc Sandalow, deals similarly lightly with this episode. Sandalow, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter who brings to the task the experience of having known and written about Pelosi for more than two decades, notes that Pelosi insisted "she had since matured" when she recounted the story to a magazine interviewer 15 years later.

But to read both books is to wonder whether Alexandra Pelosi's assessment isn't the more accurate. Fierce tribal loyalty, for better or worse, is the essential Pelosi, and she was born to the Democratic tribe. "There was no decision to go into politics," Pelosi once said. "It's what I always did."

Indeed, the most gripping part of both books is the description of Pelosi's childhood immersed in the small world of Baltimore politics, Italian American style, where being Catholic and being a Democrat were equally assumed. Pelosi's father, Tommy D'Alesandro, was a member of Congress and later mayor; politics was a family affair, with Nancy and her six older brothers expected to help keep the "favor file" of chits owed and received. D'Alesandro practiced a sharp-elbowed brand of politics whose echoes resonate in Pelosi's partisanship. As Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), told Sandalow: "Don't think she's from San Francisco. She's from Baltimore."

Though everyone pitched in, however, men ran the show. "We don't want any girls around here" was the reported reaction of Pelosi's brothers to her birth. Pelosi poignantly describes how her mother started law school, then had to quit when three sons had whooping cough simultaneously; made investments that "Daddy would not sign off on," as required at the time; patented a facial machine, "Velvex -- Beauty by Vapor," but had to give up on it because "Daddy wanted her close to home." Annunciata D'Alesandro wanted her only daughter to become a nun, but she would have settled for speaker.

The self-helpy title of Pelosi's book suggests, accurately, that this is not a traditional autobiography -- or, at 180 pamphlet-size pages, a hefty one. Think "Oprah Goes to Washington" and you'll get the picture. "I am frequently asked what event started me on my path from homemaker to House Speaker," Pelosi writes, citing her involvement in then-California Gov. Jerry Brown's 1976 presidential campaign. "One can only see in retrospect the steps taken that got you from there to here. They will vary from person to person, but in all instances, steps were taken. By recognizing opportunities, assessing risks, and taking action, success can be achieved."

Well, there you have it.

Or this bit of concluding gravitas: "As long as we recognize the power within us, we will continue to have choices, and we will continue to lead. . . . Know your power. When you do, others will know your power, too."

Sandalow offers a useful introduction to Pelosi, but he is limited by several factors, most outside his control. The first is his subject. Pelosi made history by becoming the first female speaker, but she is not otherwise a historic figure. Her speakership may prove me wrong, but it is difficult to imagine a latter-day Robert Caro writing the Pelosi version of "Master of the Senate." Another is the lack of access to the subject herself. Sandalow writes that Pelosi "did not make eye contact with me after I informed her staff that I was writing this book." Without a rich historical record and with her colleagues no doubt reluctant to cross Pelosi, Sandalow is left with anodyne quotes like this from Rep. John D. Dingell, the famously crusty Michigan Democrat who has chafed under Pelosi's tight rein on committee chairs: "She's tough as all get-out."

In addition, the demands of the publishing calendar required Sandalow to end his story just as it was starting to get interesting again, at the start of Pelosi's tenure. One wishes Sandalow had had more time to observe and assess Pelosi locking horns with old bulls like Dingell, herding the disparate cats of her caucus and reconciling lofty promises (We'll bring home the troops! We'll treat the Republicans fairly!) with gritty political realities. Some rocky moments of the transition to the speakership also get disappointingly short shrift, in particular her ill-fated move to install Murtha as majority leader in place of Steny Hoyer, whom Pelosi had known since their post-college days working for Maryland Sen. Daniel Brewster.

The reader -- certainly this reader, who can barely keep up with two children, let alone five -- comes away awestruck at Pelosi's chocolate-fueled energy. The vision of Pelosi running the nightly assembly line of children making sandwiches for the next day's lunch -- "I'm not taking any complaints," she would instruct them -- offers a preview of Pelosi's disciplined speakership. There is no doubt, too, of her commitment to core principles, from helping AIDS victims to promoting human rights in China.

Yet Sandalow seems reluctant to abandon the drilled-in objectivity of the daily news reporter for the analytical eye of the biographer; he refrains from making any judgments. "Pelosi regarded stopping President Bush's Social Security plan as her biggest triumph as Democratic leader," he writes -- with no assessment of the merits of Pelosi's determination not to offer an alternative to Bush's private accounts. Pelosi herself is proud of that approach, crafted with the help of marketing experts who advised downtrodden Democrats going up against President Bush: "You can't compete unless you take him down a few pegs first."

Democrats listened. "In spite of repeated criticisms from the inside-the-Beltway crowd" -- true confessions, I was one of them -- "that we should have our own plan, our strategy worked," she crows. Fifty pages later, Pelosi announces that the speaker she most admires is Democrat Tip O'Neill, because "he was able to work in a bipartisan way with President Reagan." If there's a contradiction there, it's one the speaker chooses not to see.