RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nancy Pelosi made news late last month, and not in a good way. She was caught on a security camera having her hair done at a San Francisco salon that has been closed to the public during the coronavirus lockdown. When confronted with the footage, she did not apologize for the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do impression, but rather expressed outrage at the salon owner for setting her up.

If you have followed Pelosi’s career over the past 15 or so years, the whole affair was hardly a surprise. Pelosi is one of the most unpopular figures in the last decade of American politics. According to RealClearPolitics, her average favorability rating stands at just 38%, compared to a 52% unfavorable rating — numbers that are worse than President Trump’s at the time of writing. Pelosi’s numbers have been this poor for quite some time. In January 2007, shortly after she was first sworn in as speaker of the House, an ABC News/ Washington Post poll found Pelosi enjoying a 54% favorable rating, compared to a 25% unfavorable rating. But last fall, the ABC/ Post poll found her approval rating at just 38%, roughly in line with where her numbers in RealClearPolitics are today.

Congressional leaders often struggle with this kind of broad unpopularity. The same ABC/ Post poll from last fall had Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with just a 25% approval rating, compared to 51% disapproval. Likewise, Harry Reid, the former Democratic leader of the Senate, usually had net-negative approval ratings when he was in office, as did former Republican Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan. It goes with the turf: Congress as an institution is widely disliked, but voters tend to approve of their own representatives, so the public usually focuses its ire upon the leaders of the institution.

What makes Pelosi unique, at least among leaders of recent memory, is the persistence of disapproval across time. She was broadly disliked in 2010, just as she is broadly disliked a decade later. Much of that can be chalked up, ironically enough, to her own unique political acumen. She has managed to maintain her leadership of the House Democratic caucus, and so has remained the face of her party in Congress, which means that she, unlike, say, Ryan or Boehner, has been consistently disliked.

Yet Pelosi also bears personal responsibility for her public standing. Her numbers really began to tank in the summer of 2009, when she and her allies pushed strongly for a national overhaul of healthcare, which at the time was decisively unpopular. The great irony is that Obamacare’s reputation has slowly improved over time, as has that of the president whose name it bears. President Barack Obama, though he took a “shellacking” (as he called it) during the 2010 midterm elections, recovered to win a comfortable reelection in 2012 and left office with a positive net approval rating. Likewise, Obamacare itself had become popular by the time the 44th president left office. Meanwhile, Pelosi’s numbers never improved.

Politically, her weak numbers have not had a negative effect on the Democratic Party since 2010. Between 2010 and 2017, she played second fiddle to Obama, whose public standing was the determinant of their party’s success (for the better in 2012, for the worse in 2014). And over the past four years, everything in our politics has come down to Trump, nothing more and nothing less.

If the incumbent president should win reelection in November, then the status quo will no doubt continue. Pelosi’s unpopularity will not have an effect on her party, as opinions about Trump will still dominate. But what if Trump loses? No doubt, Joe Biden’s public standing will be of critical importance. Yet, should the Democrats take total control of the government once more, Pelosi’s influence over public policy will increase dramatically, and, in all likelihood, her relevance in the public mind. From that perspective, Pelosi’s approach to politics, while not determinative for 2020, may be relevant to Democratic fortunes in 2021 and beyond.

The great irony of Pelosi’s career is bound up in the institution of Congress. The task of endearing herself to her party’s base, and thus a majority of the Democratic House caucus, has alienated the broad middle of the country. Her political eye has never really been toward winning over the majority per se, but rather a majority within the majority. A lot of this is just built into the nature of the House of Representatives itself: The majority party holds virtually all of the power, so the task of the leader is to pursue the interests of the majority, as defined by the caucus itself. But extreme polarization over the past few decades has resulted in a speaker who often seems wildly out of step with the rest of the country. She is an embodiment of that polarization: One of the most powerful figures in American politics is also one of the most consistently disliked because the ideological extremes exercise undue influence over the process.

Pelosi has lived this tension time and again, in little ways and big, over the course of her career atop the national political heap. Consider, for instance, her dramatic tearing up of Trump’s State of the Union address last winter. It was a cheap and shabby piece of theatrics, quite beneath the dignity of the office of the speaker, and certainly not endearing to the pragmatic voters who make up the broad middle of the country. But the Democratic “base,” the ideological die-hards who make up maybe a third of the country, adored it. And because Pelosi’s position within the party caucus depends, ultimately, on their support, it was a political winner in the moment.

The same may be said of impeachment. By the time the House got around to voting on impeachment, the public had generally soured on the endeavor, and public support never implied the kind of supermajority necessary for the Senate to remove Trump from office. But it was a matter of supreme importance to the party base, and so Pelosi pursued it relentlessly.

On a more substantive level, it was this kind of approach that induced her to push Obamacare through in the winter of 2010, even after the Democratic supermajority in the Senate disappeared, forcing her to advance a basically unfinished bill that has since proved deeply problematic on a policy level, even if it has become more popular politically. More recently, Pelosi’s hard line on coronavirus negotiations — she has consistently disrupted negotiations to push symbolic measures that her base loves but have little relevance to the exigencies of the moment — fits the same pattern.

Pelosi herself has reinforced these actions with messaging that can only be charitably described as tone-deaf. Her interview with James Corden on The Late, Late Show, in which she touted her double freezer full of ice cream during the coronavirus lockdown, made her seem out of touch with the concerns of the average person. More recently, the video footage of her in a salon made it seem like she enjoys rules that do not apply to the rest of us.

It is not a good look for any political party, especially one that supports an expansion of governmental authority, to have its leader seemingly unconcerned with the people affected by its rules and unbound by its dictates. In 2020, Pelosi’s antics, like everything else, have been subsumed under the drumbeat of Trump, Trump, Trump. Yet one cannot help but wonder how the public will react to the substance and style of her leadership if, come 2021, it is no longer distracted by the 45th president.