now it looks like maybe not but it was a challenge definitely very fulfilling. not only did i learn a lot from it but as you know, when you report on politics day in , day out there are themes that you develop andfinding your writing .

there are things you feel like your understanding in a lot of dimensions about american politics so for me , that was a way to bring a lot of that together . a white to tie together years andyears of reporting and writing about congress, women in politics, the way the political system works and congress works . and also as a magazine writer you always write more words than they are willing to put in the magazine so it's nice to have 300 pages and spell it all out >> what made you considerthat nancy pelosi was the one that would be worthy of power along this book took ? >> honestly, of all the political figures i've written about she was the one that felt big enough for a book. big enough and significant enough that i could take that deep of a dive into her. as i write about in the book i was assigned to profile her for "time magazine" when i started working there in 2017 and at first i sort of wasn't that thrilled about the

assignment. i didn't think she was all that interesting frankly and it was only once i got in there and started learning about and thinking about her and get thinking about all of the themes and characteristics of her career that i really started to think there were a lot of layers here to unpack. a lot of interesting history and residence and adjust stuff people don't know about or stuff i didn't know about her and i had a conversation with david meredith a few years ago when i was trying to come up with a book to write and i couldn't come up with anything and i said how did you know that you had something that was worthy of a book rather than a long article and he said you just have to be obsessed with it and this is the first subject i've been obsessed with in that way david meredith is always a great person forboth inspiration and to put you in the right space for something like that .

i would say so you mentioned in the text or maybe part of this was i think in the end of also in the text you imply a number of things. she's not a greatinterview . i mean, she doesn't make it fun orshe doesn't make it easy . she doesn't navel gaze, she doesn't speak off-the-cuff that much. she's also a privateperson . how do you separate how difficult a knot she is to crack with the ambitions it takes to actually know that you can crack the nut enough to write an interesting magazine story or book? >> she's really interesting because so much of politics is about communication and i don't think she'll ever be considered one of the great political orators of our age . that's not to say she's not bright and articulate and thoughtful and she isn't one of the robot pod of

politicians that's so stiff because they're terrified of saying the right thing that they just repeat themselves over and over and won't answer any questions but she isn't someone who engagesin public introspection . he is not going to tell you all the things he's been thinking aboutherself . you sort of have to figureher out and she's not a natural storyteller . as a lot of it to. a lot of political speech it fires do naturally speaking stories, they're always reeling off personal anecdotes and there's an absence of that in most of her public speaking so it was kind of an occasion for me to reflect on the role of communication and perception in politics in studying her, thinking about what is the relationship to, between how politicians perceive and what they actually do and how much of that are they responsible for? how much of that is society

responsible for? how much is a about aperson being perceived ? i don't want to get to deconstructionist but we hear about this all the time with the president for example. a lot of the presidents defenders will say get mad at his tweets but look at what he does a lot of his critics will say no, when he says matter just as much of what he does so i don't think there's quite that disjunction in nancy pelosi but the other thing about her as a communicator i would say is i think the thing that you really get to understand about her is that everything with her is about results. everything is about whatever she's going to get out of whatever the interaction is whether it's an interview, giving a speech at a fundraiser, whatever so she is just much more interested in driving a message home and she is in making you like her or making herself feel good or even making an audience of law.

it's about what is trying to communicate here and how many times do i haveto repeat it for you to get the message ? >> it's a great point. a couple days ago i interviewed for the first time alexandria ocasio-cortez who is kind of a shadow to nancy pelosi, very progressive sort of insurgent in the house that nancy pelosi runs in hertraditional way . aoc is very up in her feelings all the time. she's very open, very vulnerable, very millennial in that way and i wonder if you have any occasion to see nancy pelosi through vulnerability at all. i wonder if she ever let herself ... i'm just sort of wondering what it feels like in some ways of what she would let you see.

what it's like to be attacked the way she is, arguably the way she is, mischaracterized the way sheis ? >> i wouldn't say i got a sense of vulnerability from her. i did eventually feel like she had let her guard down enough to get a little snippy with me which was nice . it felt like she finally felt me enough. but she's not an emotive person certainly and i think you're right there's something generational about that. i think the generation she comes from being born in the 1940s, she's now 80 years old and she comes from a much more formal era, particularly for women and i think you alluded to as well, you can't separate the way she carries herself from how she has been treated. i'll keep entered into this man, this punching bag, literally republicans made an

attack of the 50 foot pelosi where she's a giant stomping on people . and i'm not saying any of that is necessarily unfair but i think when you're the subject of that kind of an onslaught, you do sort of buildyourself a suit of armor. she's even described her that self that way. i put on a suit of armor and i go into battle . he very much seespolitics as combat and she is renowned for her toughness for her stealing this . for her discipline and i think that a lot of that comes from just refusing to be vulnerable and refusing to let anyoneever see her sweat . >> do you have any sense that there's anyone or any element of today's republican party that she feels she could have some kind of safe dealings

with either in the house or in the administration? >> i mean, she certainly likes some of the republican governors. she's been dealing directly with a lot of the popular blue state republican governors been on the frontlines of thecoronavirus response . i recently profiled the governor of maryland and he someone who had gotten to know nancy pelosi a little bit, surprisingly for them both so i think she is one of these, and youhear this a lot from democrats . i miss old republican party when republicans were nice and gentle and you can deal with them . but she was literally born into the democratic party. there's never been any doubt about her partisan loyalties and she describes her upbringing that way . she says it was the catholic church and the democratic party where she came from and there's an amazing anecdote

early in the book where she just moved to california with her husband who is in finance. i have four young children. they were soon to have another and they just moved from san francisco where she knows nobody and she is staying with her mother-in-law which is pretty unpleasant for everyone involved , not that they didn't like each other but nobody wants to live with her mother-in-law for a long time and they're trying to find a house for this route of theirs and they finally find the perfect place. it's not the yard, it's not a swingset and it's perfect for their family and as they're about to sign the papers i think literally turns to the owner says so why are you renting outyour house ? and she says we're moving to washington, my husband is

accepting a job in an accident administration and she turns to the realtor and she says we're not taking it, i refuse to live in a house made available by the nixon administration so he a partisan and does not have a particular love for the republican party said she has a lot of things on a bipartisan basis throughout her career and understanding the way she operates is much more about knowing what your convictions are. having a firm sense of your values and where you come from an understanding where the other side is coming from and trying to find a way to meet somewhere in the middle that satisfiesboth parties . it isn't about and she go get a drink with john boehner, she's not cannot cut a deal with mitch mcconnell. she's not about the defection between human beings and i think that that's not the way her policies work.

much more about counting votes and doing those deals. >> was her sense and what she cares about in these ongoing endless negotiations? it strikes me that democrats are talking all the time about vote by mail, about election protections as sort of just making sure that whatever happens in november is safe on the level and so forth and yet you don't see these things. you don't see the leverage that nancy pelosi now has ever come out of this. what is your sense of how these next round of negotiations might go, especially given how important those two issues are to the democrats. >> it's been interesting to watch. she always is sort of on this type i guess you could say but it's a high wire act for her where you have a left saying she's not pulling out

enough against the republicans and republicans calling her an obstructionist for not immediately giving her everything they want so she's got to balance those competing demands and i think what you see is she recognizes the urgency of this moment. she knows that action has to happen fast and that's hard in a congress as gridlocked and acrimonious as this one but she also feels the american people put the democrats in charge of the house for a reason and therefore they deserve a seat at the table so in the early rounds of some of these negotiations toward these trillion dollar bills they've been passing there was an attempt to go around her, cut her out. mitch mcconnell did not originally agreed to her demand to have four quarter negotiations between the republican and democratic leaders of the house and senate . and she says look, i need to be at that table. i need to be part of this

discussion and i'm willing to be reasonable to give up some of my initial demands but i need to be at that table so i think that's what she's trying to balance going forward. so i think that's something that a lot of republican and democratic leaders and state from other localities are talking about and she calculated in the last negotiation that it would become politically impossible for republicans to continue to deny that funding and so we do now see initially mitch mcconnell taking the position we were going to bail out the states and it was the states problem for not being fiscally responsible to put billions and billions of dollars aside for a once in a centurypandemic . and i think she realized where now seeing it happen that it became politically untenable for the republicans

because a lot of the republican senators andthe members are saying my state needs this . you can't just say no to this . >> do you have a sense that her power was ever truly threatened within the caucus ? i guess the last time would have been 2017. tim ryan of ohio, did they run against her? i know he was talking about it. >> he did it in 2016 but not in 2018. >> especially lately some younger people have talked about this but did you have a sense that other than going back and forth between the majority and minority, she was ever written inside the caucus? >> there was a fair amount of angst about her leadership during those years in the minority which were thankless for the democratic caucus . a lot of house democrats were frustrated that they had the same leaders for 13, 15, 17

years and these leaders are now in the upper 70s, early 80s and a lot of people thoughtit was time for a fresh face . for reasons of perfection mostly and feelings of personal ambition. a lot of them felt they should have a turn to move up the ladder and because of an emplacement in top leadership that wasn't fair to a lot of numbers with potential for leadership and also that because she had been the subject of so many attacks, either because the republicans had spent hundreds of millions of dollars i think at this point , demonizing her and turning her into this bogeyman that she's become politically toxic particularly for democrats and republican leaning districts who needed to keep their seats to get the majority. and so the feeling was she worked there to be the subject of those attacks it would be better politics than a democrat but you didn't

hear that someone else could do abetter job managing the house . i think someone else to do a better job shaping these complex pieces of legislation . that was never the appeal of someone like a tim ryan who challenged her in 2016 or a seth moulton and others who did not run against her but tried to outstrip the speakership in 2018. it was never about what she sees as her job which is legislating. it wasmuch more about these external factors . >> do you think if things go well for democrats in november democrats keep the house, is it conceivable that they could keep the same leadership team going forward and if biden wins they could have someone of equal age in the white house and just status quo or do you think again, i guessthis is a crystal ball thing . i mean, is this probably the last hurrah in some ways for this team ?

>> i don't know and i have a firm policy against making predictions but one bit of rest reporting in the book, i don't think it's been previously reported but back in 2018 that was that leadership race where she worked very hard to defuse this challenge because she could not, she could afford to lose less than 10 percent of the caucus when it came to that vote on the house floor. in order to be elected see her again though she really had to win over almost everyone in that sort of large unruly ideologically and graphically diverse democratic caucus. and so one of the conditions that she finally accepted to make the sort of final deal to get those votes wasshe agreed to a term limit . that would force down in 2022, now there's sort of stipulations on it but it said how she could serve no more than two more terms in the congress and the next one and i report in the book she

walked into her next meeting and said i wasn't giving anything away becausei only planned to stay for one term anyway . other things have changed since then but it does reveal that at least at the time and this also by the way, i learned a lot about negotiating tactics from studying nancy pelosi, this is one of her tactics is a big concession. to pretend that it's terribly painful to get something out that actually you're not getting up at all because you either didn't mind giving it up foryou didn't want it in first place . there's a place in the book where you see her in these negotiating postures where she pretends that she's giving up something that's terribly painful and actually sees one. >> watching this master negotiator and studying her help you in any way as a parent of three young kids ? i think it has. i think a lot of these negotiating tactics came from

her experience as amother , as the one who had five children in six years and two by all accounts but ran an extremely disciplined household . there's a friend of nancy pelosi once said that she knew she was destined for political success when she saw these five children all holding their own laundry which i am not there yet with my three kids but if you think about it, toddlers and politicians havea lot in common . they're both physically narcissistic, unreasonable egomaniacs that if you can make them feel like their egos are being sued, you can get entity what you want and so i do feel like some of these negotiating tactics that i've learned from watching nancy pelosi to come in handy when you're dealing withchildren . there's a big concession and another one i like is the name your price. where you say to someone what

do i have to do to get you to give me ask and they name a price that they think is outlandish orimpossible . well sure, we don't want to let you put the aids quilt on thenational mall . but if you could find a way to lift up the quilts every 20 minutes so the grass and breathe, then you can do it and she says okay fine and she gets volunteers all stand around the sides of the aids quilt and every 20 minutes and let the quilts so the grass can breathe and at that point the parks service has no choice but to say we didn't think you could satisfy this condition but you did so we have to giveyou what you want . >> i mean, it's interesting that there's a stigma to this but you mentioned aids and she mentioned san francisco. that was an issue that's close to her given what she represents around a lot of people she knows and she's been around for a while, certainly since the80s .

you think she has admission, has talked in some ways about the covid-19 outbreak and reminding him of his experience with polio when he was growing up . are there any echoes at all the you think between what we are living through now and this would of just the uncertainty and the out-of-control nests of having this new and scary disease can be very fatal, just sort of taking over everything? i haven't formulated this into a question but i'm wondering if this is something you ever heard her talk about or she would see any parallelsat all ? >> i haven't heard her make a comparison, i haven't heard everything she said in the past few weeks but i think there are parallels. one of the parallels frankly the republican at the president at the time was slow to acknowledge the start of the crisis and that's something we've seen play out abundantly in the current

situation and the time it took years for president reagan even to say the words hiv or aids so a big part of what she was a part of, working with advocates for the gay community or other members who cared about the issue, she wasn't alone but one of the things that she had to do first before she could get help for the victims of the crisis was to raise awareness of the crisis and convince everybody on both ends of the political spectrum and it was a problem that had to be dealt with . at the federal government had to grapple with it so one of the things that she did early on was to mail a booklet to every constituents in her district of the surgeon general's information about aids and just to bust a lot of myths surrounding the disease. you can't get from hugging,

you can't get from toiletries or whatever just to get that information out there the federal government ended up doing the same thing shortly thereafter, spending hundreds of millions of households information packets so that people understood the disease and then they could proceed to respond to it. >> this could be in a category and i'm not going to ask you to make a prediction but i'm going to present a hypothetical and have youtake a swing at. in november , the democrats keep thehouse . nancy pelosi days on as speaker donald trump is reelected. do you and let's say the same goes for the 50 so technically whoever the vice president is would have the deciding vote. do you see anything salvageable in the pelosi trump relationship that could actually make that, those two

most powerful figures in washington if that scenario arose, you think they could dealwith each other ? do you think there is no ground there is an mark you think if they're both in the political positions are such that they don't haveto get reelected again, do you see anything happening potentially between the two of them knowing what you know about them ? >> i got it only because of the personal relationship. i haven't spoken in months and it's mostly because trump is mad at her for impeaching him . she is much morecold-blooded about these things . she doesn't let her personal feelings whether or not he's going to deal with someone on policy and she does have a firm set of policy convictions which i think is fair to say the president does not. so she spent a lot of time trying to negotiate with him on infrastructure, this is something that when donald trump talks about building roads and bridges, the kind of sound like a democrat.

he wants to spend lots of money, build lots of stuff and she was, she kept coming to the negotiation table until he walked away, he was the one who slammed his hands down on the table in the middle of it infrastructure negotiation and said i can't talk to youas long as this witchhunt is going on so she was willing to deal . she was willing to continue those policy negotiations even as impeachment and all the investigations were underway but the president was not so as long as the president is going to stick on her, there's nothing she can do about that but i think she's willing to and she also as a matter of politics, and other of electoral politics is obsessed with trying to show the american people at democrats are interested in government so the house is passing all these bills, hundreds of them that are sitting on mitch mcconnell's desk she does want people to know that if she wants to send that message that they can trust the democrats to be

put in charge of things, to end the sort ofpartisanship and gridlock , not to run out of control towards the left wing of the party and those desires but to be sensible and to actually get things done . i don't think she's lying, we would do a bill on infrastructure, we would do a bill on research and drugs, there areareas of commonality at least in the rhetoric . but the negotiations i think it's fair to say arenot ongoing . >> i have seen a picture of you, i don't see the live version of you. i don't know if i'm the only one but i can hear youso i'm just going to proceed . >> could you refresh your browser quickly? >> i can still see it everyone. >> i can't do, i'm getting a couple of, a little bit of feedback is all. everybody, sorry call the conversation but we will have it back upand running quickly

. >> there you are. so you mentioned impeachment. what is your sense of, how does nancy pelosi get to impeachment? she was all up for a while, there were more aggressive members of congress wanted to move earlyon on impeachment . what was it that brought her around? was it the facts of the ukraine case or was it something else or did she feel like she had no choice even where the caucus was? >> i think it was both. i think she felt it had to be done on the merits and it was also the position that the caucus, the vulnerable members of the caucus had moved to she does not like the suggestion that she katie or that she was following rather than leaving thecaucus . but i do think it's fair to say that she always has a pointless endeavor and you have to remember she lived through the clinton impeachment which she thought

was a joke. that's the word she always you for it. but it was basically a little persecution on the part of the republican party that really for crass reasons did not like bill clinton as president and then when she first became speaker in 2007 she is a constant drumbeat of calls from the left to impeach president bush and so she had code pink protesters roaming the halls of congress every day and camped out in her yard in san francisco when cindy sheehan, the antiwar activists ran against her in a primary over this unwillingness to impeach president bush. so it wasn't as loud drumbeat as we had these past couple of years but was another experience that informed her to say i didn't get into it then because i thought it would be by seven pointless and i think she felt the same way and i think she still

feels that way . she looks at impeachment in the rearview mirror and says we have to do it, the president forced us todo it because of his conduct . but what did it accomplish? and if you're nancy pelosi and you care about results you really don't see the point of this feeling that you know it's not going to remove the president. you know it's not going to achieve anything tangible. she always says in politics you have to know your wife and her line is the children. so she always is going to look at any particular political problem and say well, out of this feed a hungry child or improve the lives of workers aware or human rights around the world and all impeachment did interview was sort of put on a divisive show that didn't actually accomplish anything and she would say that i

think she does feel that the one thing accomplished was to put an asterisk next to president trump's name in the history books. she'll always say he's been impeached and he can't do anything to change that. but other than that i do think she feels it's kind of pointless. >> you think she has regrets about this? >> she's not a person who has regrets. you can ask that many times and do you grand regret and she says i don't do that. i don't do regrets. hedoesn't do regret and she doesn't do the ? >> he always had a certain personal fondness but president bush was someone that she used to call a gentleman all the time and she still does. they had some moments that she remembers and they seem to have had something if not a working relationshipat the time , at least five work. you see anything about donald trump that she has been used for orany respect for ?

>> no, i don't think so but i think again, i don't speak for her and i don't pretend to. but when i after a sort of version of this question she's always careful to say he doesn't disrespect the people who voted for him. she doesn't want to be caught in a sort of basket of deplorable moment and the metaphor she uses which i find tremendously entertaining if you ever known someone who was dating enter and you can't tell that person at their dating enter or they will just not being friends with you. you have to weed them out and try to subtly show them what he is doing to them so she says i hope these people will realize what the president is doing to them but i don't blame them. for being enthralled with it. >> is an interesting way of looking at it . so do you have any sense, have they read the book or

have has his office, was the last round of fact checking and debates, do you have any sense that they have, that they know what's in it? >> it had books that came out in galleys, i want to be fair that the speaker and her staff had no editorial control of the book. it's my book, it's my characterization. she was helpful in terms of giving me interviews and allowing me to interview a lot of people around her. but this is not authorized in the sense that she signed off on thecontent . >> has ever done anauthorized biography ? >> he's written a memoir with a writer and there's a lot of good material in there that i drew on in the book but they had the book since itwas in galleys. pretty busy from what i understand . whether she has had a chance

to look through it, ... >> i'm sure she's watching this. so i continued to interact with her staff. >> i don't mean to focus on something aesthetic but the cover is great and i love the lack of subtitle because there is this whole subtitle industrial complex in political books where you have your title and let's give the whole game away in the next endless subtitle but what made you decide to, i know we are word people and there are the graphics people and so forth but what made you decide to get very confidently call it loc with nothing else that graphic to use? >> i have to give a shout out to my publisher and re-hold. the designer came up with this design, i never would have come up with so something okay and stylish.

i love the cover, i think it captures her, captures the tone of the book. captures a lot of what i've been talking about about the way the culture has caught up to her brand of femininity after many years of sort of abuse. but also i think everyone knows who it is not from the title . i cut people a lot of slack who need a subtitle to communicate why this topic they're writing about is significant . if i were writing about some lesser-known figure i would need a subtitle to tell you this is the man who, that made the atomic bomb thatwill mark . but you know, everyone knows who she is. there's only one person you're talking about when you say nancy pelosi and for all of his wonderful qualities, i think i like the simplicity

of it. i like the simplicity of the cover design. but i also think it sort of speaks for itself in that she is a figure who is already pretty famous enough. people are going to know who she is when they pick upthe book . >> you don't have to sell the subject. but what made you decide to have, to sort of ... what made you decide to have such an unintrusive voice inthe book ? there are a lot of people who profile and have interviewed like you and i do and you have a sense of what it's like in the room with them. what it's like to talk to them, the authors voice comes through. you can talk a little bit about your own experience. you really stand back. i'm wondering how you decided to write in the voice that you did and if you had to develop it over time as you

were gettinginto the narrative ? >> i'm not sure if it was really even a conscious decision . i do as a profiler) writer i often do right in the first person. i think it can help bring the reader into the story like you said. in this case i just wanted to tell her story, almost in a novelistic fashion. i wanted it to feel like a work of storytelling more than a work of reporting so there's not a lot of direct quote in the book. it's sort of contemporaneous quotes, not a lot of people that i've interviewed looking back and reflecting on things that happened and i wanted to keep it in the moment i wanted people to feel like they were experiencing this as it happened. but you know, it's i've never done about graffiti before and i think it is an

interesting problem that all biographers have of wanting to be insideand outside your subject at the same time . wanting to see things through their eyes not, also wanting to be able to have a little bit of objectivity and distance to how they are perceived by others and to be somewhat skeptical of the stories they tellthemselves which we all do . so let people judge whether or not i did that successfully but that was what i was trying to achieve. >> i am just had a text that said, i'm moving to q&a when weget a chance . so we're going to turn this over to our audience and we're going to take questions and let's see. is there some way you can ask questions? i'm just now throwing myself at the mercy of technology and hoping at some point in the future there will be questions that appear before

me and that you will ask them in some way. >> there's a question you if you click on that, the list comes up. >> here we go, okay. so i will pick which one here? that's a good one. i don't know if i should name , martina asks molly, what is the most surprising thing you learned about speaker pelosi. >> hard to say at this point but i think one of the things that surprised me about her was her aggression, frankly. herassertiveness, her boldness .she came up at a time when it was not really culturally acceptable for women to be strong and assertive and aggressive but she is a real risk taker she is a gambler in some ways . she's willing to get in

people's faces so i think this is now familiar to people from ripping up trumps speech and chasing down a reporter who accused her of hating the president saying don't mess with me but this goes all the way back to the earliest days of her career. she's always been willing to in people's faces stick up for herself and i think it's comes from her, it also comes from her sense of feminism that she always felt able to advocate for herself in that way. one of my favorite lesser-known stories from her career that's in the book is about her activism on human rights in china . and this is someone who in 1991 traveled to beijing with some of her colleagues and then on the last day of their state sanctioned trip, they told the chinese authorities

they were too tired to go on their tour of the great wall read they snuck out the back of their hotel, a taxi to get them in square and one of the congressman who she was with who played on the dukes of hazard, he had smuggled this banner in his underwear from hong kong and they pulled it out and unfurled it and it said for those died for democracy in china and then they were immediately attacked by the chinese police who take them out of the square and actually detailing some of the journalists covering this. you can still see the video of this incident so she quite literally wrist bodily harm in order to stage this very bolddemonstration for what she believed in . and politically as well, back in 2003 when a lot of the top democrats including the democratic house leader at the time, including people

like hillary clinton and john kerry thought that it would be bad politics to oppose the iraq war and she came up against it and she encouraged her colleagues to be against it and she went against the war resolution, against her own leadership because he believed so strongly that the war was the wrong thing to do because at the top democrat on the intelligence committee she had seen the case for war that the administration was presenting and she didn't think that itstood up to scrutiny . but i think she's known for her toughness. she's known for her stealing us but that kind of boldness which i think powered her to where she is today. that was the boldness to run for leadership when literally no woman had a top leadership position in either house of congress. she's still the only woman to lead her party in the house of congress and she had to

take on the male-dominated establishment to do that, there were only 23 women in the house of representatives when she got there out of 435 members and when she said she wanted, when she decided to seek this leadership position when she heard through the grapevine that the men in power were saying who said she could run? she's always been someone who said i don't need your permission. i'm going to do this because i believe i can do it. >> this is a question from charisse pastor. did pelosi have a frustration with obama's cabinet relative to experience? >> i think that is a big theme of the chapter through the book about the obama era . was that now, she and obama became very close. they have a lot of mutual respect and trust and like and so i don't want to make it seem like there's any sort of grudge between them.

but it was the sort of theme of congressional coverage throughout the obama years democrats in the house and senate never felt like the president paid enough attention to them. never felt like he was a particularly great negotiator when it came to dealing with the republicans . they always felt he brought too much up front, that he was so, he had made this comment of bipartisanship and consensus in healing the country and bringing people together and so the republicans realize that you can't do this if we don't go along with it and we can keep him fromfulfilling this promise . and hurt him politically and i think she realized that a long time before he did . and so she was frustrated that he continued to go to great lengths to try to get republicans to do things with him. when she didn't think they were negotiating in good faith. she didn't think they ever had any intention of cooperating. so a lot of thefrustration came from that dynamic . >> so given my expert

accountabilities i see that the question has the most votes that they want me to ask, i'm going to ask. this is liz lee, i've been impressed with speaker pelosi's ability to bring together diverse factions of the democratic party even on the most challenging issues. what strategy did you identify and how she is able to do this effectively? >> that is a great question than the one i spent a lot of time thinking about . this is always been her grip strength and when you think about it it stands in contrast to the republican speakers who preceded her. the house more or less fell apart while john weiner and paul ryan were in charge of the republican caucus, the entire house and it technically did but they were unable to keep their caucus together and i think a lot of people said their caucus is so diverse. you have those unreasonable freedom caucus people.

you've got people from more liberal districts, more conservative districts, more rural districts but the democratic caucus is are more diverse in the republican caucus. i think both demographically and ideologically and yet we have not, there have been some quite fractious disagreements between different actions of the caucus. can you still hear me? >> your good, i'm sorry. >> but she is very good and i think from the time she became democratic leader she has always put a premium on party discipline. change some of the rules of the caucus, change rules of the house the more painful for members to vote against the caucasus. and she can be very talking that regard but i think similar to her mother and strategy, she wields the

carrot and the stick very expertly and she's very good at letting people know if she's not mad at you, just disappointed. that feeling of disappointment is very cute if you cross her. you may live to regret it. and so but it comes down to i mentioned some of these negotiating strategies and there are certain concrete tips and tricks that you can point to but what i ended up concluding in a larger sense is that it really is just an incredible understanding of human nature on her part. she has an incrediblememory for details and people . never forget a face, always knows not only who you are which i can't even tell apart all the members of the house of representatives much less remember all their names and where they come from but she not only knows that, he goes your parents and what your priorities are, what issues you happen to be interestedin

. what caucasus you're a member of. but the makeup of your district is and what might be difficultfor you to do politically . she keeps all of that in her head and she just knows offer people. she has, she maintains those relationships. she makes everybody feel they can listen to and her and a lot of times that's all it takes. he seems to have endless time to just listen to people and she will wear them out. if someone, she's trying to talk someone into something she'll just keep them in the negotiating session until they give up and relent because she's outlasted them. >> i want to recognize we now have over 500 people on our attendance list here so before i asked the next question i want to thank everyone for coming and also there will be a separate itch for this since we're all on computers there's going to be a 1031 and immediately by

this on kindle or something like that and you are not permitted to do that, you should do it on politics and prose either online or unkind ordering thing that they can tell you about so anyway, thank you all forbeing here the next question is , it's actually for the follows on what you were just talking about witches do you talk with nancy pelosi about what it was like growing up in a political family in baltimore and the reason that i heard it go from when you were just answering is that knowing faces and names and writing thank you notes and so forth is a very old sort of loss, political way and i'm wondering whether she sort of talked about what her political background was like and how it was applied to runningcongress ? >> absolutely, her father was a congressman from baltimore when she was born and by the time she was seven he had

become the mayor of baltimore and this is old-school democratic machine urban politics where you know, there's patronage, there's favor training and all the different demographics in the city that you have sort of a political loss of control their votes and you kind of got to pay court to that person so i definitely think you can see a lot of that old-school political style in the legislative tactics that she used. at the same time a lot of what i tried to do in the early chapters of this book is refocus attention on her mother because i think it's so natural to see the political heritage and her father because of where she joined the family business but she's always taken pains to say that she was shaped equally by the influence of her mother and she talks openly which i think is interesting about how her mother felt in her life and how her mother was never able to achieve her dreams and goals because she was a woman and about how her mother

wanted the auctioneer, wanted to go to law school and market and sell for beauty objects that she patented and her husband would not give her her signature which was what women needed in order to do things like that . so she was very shaped and not to be stereotypical but her mother was very strong and assertive italian-american lady, also not afraid to get up in people's faces. there's a story that she punched a poll worker in the face who she was not and she ran a lot of the political operation for herhusband . she never got the credit. she wasn't one whose name was on the ballot but she was the one running the women's democratic club out of the basement, running constituent services operations, they call it a favor file out of the family parlor where they would take people's names and refer them if they needed to get a job or whatever so her

mother was a big part of that work in the last thing i would say about her heritage is it's very grassroots, if you're an urban politician, you've got to know every district and you can't run a campaign with a bunch of expensive television ads. you've got to get out there and do the work so that's still the advice that she gives to candidates who she recruits for office and it's still the way she thinks about electoral politics is precinct by precinct, blockby block at the ground level . her older brother who later became mayor of baltimore and was a great friend and mentor called human nature in the raw and i love that description of ground-level politics. >> i think we have time for a couple more, you can text me if we should wrap it up but

let's see. this question has a lot of support from the voters so i'm going to ask this one from jessica. has nancy pelosi ever been interested in running for president or the senate ? do you think that makes her more powerful in the house ? >> no and yes to those two questions. she has never, there was a time when she was up and coming in politics when she was new to the house where every once in a while she'd be on somebody's long list of potential vice presidential candidates. but she always said she wasn't interested. she's never dangled any hints that she might be interested in higher office and every politician saysthis . it's sort of part of the repertoire if someone asks

you are you looking for the next rung of the ladder you're supposed to say no, and focus on the house and the great people of this district but i think she's been saying that for long enough that it's become believable and it is a big part of her power. it's a very smart observation by jessica, thank you jessica because her members know that she isn't trying to make a name forherself . she isn't, her predecessor as leader of the democrats. everyone knew that he wanted to be president. he'd run for president before, he was going to run again in 2004 so everyone knew that as much as he was darting their interest and running the caucus in the house, he also had his eye on the next thing he had a personal ambition and stay in what was going on that eroded his focus and she's never had . no member of her caucus thinks that she is just trying to pass a resume she can see the next rung up on

the ladder so that gives her a lot of credibility in telling her members that she focused on being out for their interests. >> i've been told this is the last question and i'm just going to go with majority rules so 13 people have voted for this question. i molly, this is from joe. joe asks molly, what kind of access did you get to the speaker? >> she gave me a series of interviews and i've been covering her since before i started writing the book so i had interviewed her deviously prior to starting work on the biography. i would not say that we became friends. she never invited me around the house or introduced me to her family or that kind of thing. there's a formality to her, there's a sense of remove that she has and she's not, he has good relationships with the capitol hill press corps. but she isn't the sort of chummy politician that's

strikes reporters as colorful and entertaining and so i talk about this a little bit in the book. i do sort of ] the fourth wall in the chapter and talk about my personal feelings and reflections about the reporting process. and i did never feel like i really got inside her head in that way. i felt like i observed her very closely and i got to understand the way she works andoperates . but because she isn't someone who engages in public introspection, i think she's a fundamentally private person and i was not able to fullypenetrate that . >> i'll say again it's a great book and thank you all for being here. i know you're all wearing masks so i appreciate it. >> it's a long wait for up

and down a flight of stairs. >> but everyone by the book, it's a great national treasure, certainly thank you for watching us and i guess can we sign off work and i sign off ? >> you can go right ahead. i will say before we close tonight that we thank you all so much for being here in the audience and molly marcus is a lovely conversation about a personal favorite coal figure of mine at least and thank you so much and i do encourage the audience to buy the book from politics and prose. your patronage is what's allowing us to stay up and running right now. so those book sales are crucial and also, we are offering you the option tonight to come into politics and prose.we are accepting

donations and we really appreciate everyone that comes in . but definitely, definitely purchase pelosi from molly tonight. we have a lot of other great events coming up. down the pipeline and i urge you to click on the politics and prose logoabove . but until then i hope to see you again. stay well, stay well read if you can everybody. goodbye, all. >> is a look at some publishing industry news. jonathan karp has been named new ceo of simon and schuster. he joined in 2010 and was previously the president and publisher of the companies of thepublishing division . he succeeds carolyn reidy who died last month.

the new york times reports on a busier than usual fall publishing season with the addition of books from the spring that were delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic . expected logjams of new titles as many publishers concerned about media attention and sales . president and publisher of grove atlantic weight in saying all the decisions we make our guesswork , none of us know what we're doing. former wall street journal reporter karen blumenthal died at the age of 61. she was the author of several nonfiction books for children which included histories of title ix, roe versus wade in 1929 stockmarket crash . also in the news, npd bookscan reports that book sales were up 11 percent for the week ending may 23. although nonfiction sales up two percent for the weekend remain down a percent for the year. the library of congress has announced due to the coronavirus pandemic this year's national book festival will take place virtually from september 24 through september 26 and include