'Pelosi' review: The evolution of a politican

The great strength of Molly Ball's "Pelosi," the story of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, is the recognition that America's most successful female politician is, ironically, an urban machine anachronism. Ball's appreciation of Pelosi's ancient abilities makes this a smart, solid biography with a lesson: Despite our current fixation on political showmanship, politics works best in a complicated democracy like ours when its practitioners can navigate their way through the byzantine cloakrooms of power.

In Ball's account, Pelosi is as tough as bullets. She knows how to count votes, how to negotiate and how to herd her tribe. She knows what can get passed, against the odds — like the Affordable Care Act — and what can't. These are lost skills in American politics, atrophied in the modern-day rush to preen and tweet. Ball makes a convincing case that no woman could have made it to the top without them.

It didn't hurt, Ball argues, that before entering politics Pelosi had five children in six years and created order out of the ensuing chaos. She raised those children in San Francisco — her husband, Paul, is a financier and developer — and by all accounts, Pelosi loved being a mother. But the political itch was always there, the partisanship always fierce: Early on, she refused to buy a house she loved because it had been "made available" by a Republican who had joined the Nixon administration. And as the children became teenagers, Pelosi began holding house parties to fundraise for the local Democratic Party. She was a brilliant rainmaker, eventually a legendary one; her ability to raise money for fellow House members was a crucial weapon in her rise to the top.

Her ability to raise money certainly made her an attractive candidate for Congress in 1986; her ability to organize relentlessly made her a successful one. One of her mentors, the late congressman Phillip Burton, paid her his ultimate compliment: She was "operational." As opposed to ideological, or aspirational, or charismatic.

Pelosi was ideological, of course. She was the very definition of a "San Francisco liberal." She supported and defended her district's gay community with passion. She was feminist, antiwar, pro-environment, a furious opponent of trade with China because of that country's human rights abuses. Indeed, it was her partisanship that led to her greatest insight about politics in the 21st century: Bipartisanship was a crock. The Republicans weren't going to play. This became particularly apparent after Barack Obama became president. The passage of the Affordable Care Act was his and the speaker's signature achievement, but, Ball writes, "the key to Obama's triumph had not been his ability to reach across the aisle, but Pelosi's skill at holding her caucus together."

"Pelosi" isn't quite hagiography. Ball admits to admiring the speaker, but she is honest about her deficits: Pelosi is a clumsy public speaker, not much of a policy visionary and vengeful, often to a fault. She was on her way to losing her leadership position, a brittle, ill-tempered has-been — in 2014, she chased a Republican congressman across the floor of the House, shouting: "You are an insignificant person!" — when she was given the gift of Donald Trump as an adversary.

Trump was the perfect mark for a machine pol with Pelosi's talents: He was reality TV and she was reality. It was, and is, a metaphoric battle: Trump, the rear-guard, testosterone-addled bloviator and Pelosi the avatar of a feminist political future. Ball quotes Amy Klobuchar's famous observation: "If you think a woman can't beat Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day."

But she does it the old-fashioned way — counting the votes, twisting the arms, knowing when and how to cut a deal.

Politics evolves, of course, but there are ways and means that endure and that are essential. Pelosi has proved that the same ceremonies that worked in the wards of Baltimore can be successful in Washington's corridors of power. Indeed, her style may point the way toward the new, pragmatic politics we'll need after the coronavirus pandemic. And in the end, wouldn't it be a lovely thing if Pelosi, mother of five and daughter of the machine, proved that the best path to power for women — and maybe even for a few thoughtful men — ran through the retail politics of the past?