This week’s “Then and Now,” where Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer and I try to provide a little historical context, is about Nancy Pelosi. I forgot to mention on the tape that in 2007, my ailing mother, Joanne Alter, who knew Pelosi, grew angry that neither Newsweek, where I worked, nor TIME put Pelosi on the cover when she became the first woman speaker of the House in U.S. history. I later learned that Pelosi herself was also miffed by this oversight. All I can say now is that mom and madame speaker were absolutely right!
JULIAN ZELIZER:
This week, as Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi announced that she’d be retiring from Congress, I was thinking back to 2007 when she became speaker of the House after the 2006 midterm elections. It’s a reminder of what midterms can do. In 2006, a lot of Democrats were certainly still feeling pretty down. President Bush had been re elected two years earlier against John Kerry, Hurricane Katrina had exposed kind of real incompetence in governing, and of course, the war in Iraq was raging and deeply unpopular with so much of the country. The Democrats put together a very successful midterm retake control.
Pelosi is the speaker in 2007 and she reverses the country’s course on so many things. She brought fundamental change in how the war in Iraq would be fought, with more of a focus on winning support from Iraqi civilians. And then she puts all kinds of issues on the national agenda: the minimum wage, health care and much more. This really sets the path to 2008, when Obama first won. So it’s a reminder of the power of midterms and the role that she played in revitalizing the Democratic Party.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Now that she’s announced her retirement, I think it’s an appropriate time to take stock of the fact that Nancy Pelosi is the most powerful woman in American history. Full stop. The only one who could possibly come close is Hillary Clinton, who was first lady, senator and secretary of state. But if you look at health care, for instance—“Hillarycare” as they called it in 1993 and ’94— it failed. They got some stuff done later in the Clinton Administration on children’s health but not the big bill. Obamacare, on the other hand, changed health care profoundly. It ended the era in American life where you had to sell your home, in many cases, if you got sick, or declare personal bankruptcy. That’s over, largely thanks to not just Barack Obama, but Nancy Pelosi.
After a special election in in Massachusetts in early 2010, it looked like Obamacare was dead, and even the White House had kind of given up on it. But Nancy Pelosi pulled it over the finish line, and that was only one of many major pieces of legislation that we would not have if it were not for her.
You can tell how well she did by the abuse that was heaped on her by the Republicans. They called her drunk, and when her husband was attacked and put into a coma by a man wielding a hammer, Trump and his minions laughed at it, which is one of the most disgusting things of all of the disgusting things that they’ve done. It was because Nancy Pelosi was so effective.
