Nancy Pelosi’s Quiet, Cunning Power: “As Brilliant as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos”

When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thanked Joe Biden in her 2024 DNC speech, the candidate she more or less forced out of the race, giving one of the briefest speeches of the star-studded evening. It wasn’t splashy, it wasn’t rousing, and it wasn’t even totally necessary. The point was perhaps to publicly extol Biden after—reportedly, if not admittedly—shanking him. The speech was a flex of tightly controlled unity rather than pomp. Pelosi doesn’t wield her power in boisterous public displays or in long-winded speeches, like certain former presidents. She speaks softly, and she carries the biggest stick. And her goal now is simple: to make sure that Donald Trump never steps foot in the White House again.

Four decades ago, she was a 41-year-old Democrat whom The New York Times had just called “probably the least known of the key women at the Democratic National Convention,” when she was preparing to host delegates from her home state of Maryland at her well-appointed home in San Francisco.

“Basically, I’m an organizer,” Pelosi told the Times. “I had five children in six years, so this is not so difficult.”

As Democrats gathered for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, she was widely considered the most powerful woman in politics – with the exception of the newly minted Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Pelosi is now, and has always been, more orchestrator than organizer. She helped facilitate President Biden’s exit from the race, which was earthshaking to some and a long time coming to others. The last time a president decided not to seek a second term was more than 55 years ago, when Lyndon Baines Johnson shocked the country – and most of his staff – with the announcement that he wouldn’t run again. After Pelosi made it clear that she was not exactly begging Biden to stay, his days were apparently numbered. “She is as brilliant as Steve Jobs; she’s as brilliant as Jeff Bezos,” says Stacy Kerr, who was a senior adviser to Pelosi from 2002 to 2011. “Her domain is politics, and she’s created a new benchmark.”

Even as chair of the host committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Pelosi was already exercising “the art of power,” the phrase that became the title of her recently released book. (The title shades The Art of the Deal, by her nemesis, former President Donald Trump.) The committee raised $3 million to help finance that convention, and Pelosi oversaw 10,000 volunteers. Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in a landslide victory that year, but the convention itself was a triumph. She and Diane Feinstein, who was mayor of San Francisco at the time, worked to convince wary Democrats that the city was safe amid the AIDS epidemic, which was just beginning to get attention. It was a launching point for each of their groundbreaking careers.

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John Burton, a former California congressman and chair of the California Democratic Party, has known Pelosi since the 1970s. He told me recently that he didn’t know that Pelosi had politics in her blood, even though she hailed from a famous Democratic family in Maryland. When his sister-in-law, Representative Sala Burton, who was dying of cancer, told him that she wanted Pelosi to take over her seat in Congress, he said he remembered thinking, Is she bullshitting me or what? “Obviously,” he quipped, “she was not.”

“People have been underestimating her for a long, long time and they do so at their peril,” says Burton.

She’s always had a backbone made of steel. In a New York Times feature from July 1, 1984, a couple of weeks before the convention began, Pelosi addressed criticism of San Francisco’s welcome to the queer community. “Who are these gays?” Pelosi asked rhetorically. “They’re somebody’s child, brother, sister, friend, that’s who. They’re not from another planet. The fact that they’re here means that the rest of the country is not as hospitable to them as we are.… This is a city of equal rights and all God’s children, and one of the reasons San Francisco is the way it is is because other places out there don’t practice what they preach.” But she learned a painful lesson when she lost a bid to become DNC chair in the mid-1980s. “I learned a lot,” she told Jerry Rafshoon, who had been a top White House aide to Jimmy Carter. “I learned that men will lie to you.”