More from the book: NP vs. AOC
Inside Nancy Pelosi’s War With AOC and the Squad - POLITICO - "How the House speaker put Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her place."
“Nancy doesn’t have much patience for people who don’t know what they don’t know.” - a senior Congressional Democrat on what NP really thinks about AOC.
A previous POLITICO article described her way of dealing as "an iron fist in a Gucci glove." The article continued with "She hadn’t survived as the top Democrat in the House for nearly two decades by ignoring challenges or challengers. Instead, she applied the lessons she had learned to win them over, or at least keep them at bay."
The relationship between the speaker and AOC, her party’s most charismatic newcomer, is complicated. Colleagues and congressional aides said Pelosi saw the New York congresswoman as a talented person but one who was often naïve about how the institution worked and unrealistic about what could be achieved, and how. She feared the Squad’s demands would imperil hard-won Democratic control — the slim majority that had put Democrats in a position to change the country’s course, but not to win every battle.
NP's allies often compared AOC to Bernie Sanders, a leader with an ideological vision, but one who was not very capable of getting much of it enacted. That's appropriate in a certain way, because AOC started out by campaigning for BS, and she was then recruited by some former BS campaigners to run for Congress.
From the article: "She was exactly the sort of fresh-faced, would-be revolutionary who had been giving speakers of the House trouble for generations. Pelosi saw them coming a mile away."
She told newcomers "I say to them, as advocates, outsiders, it is our nature to be relentless, persistent, and dissatisfied" and "When you come in, cross that door, take that oath, you have to be oriented toward results. Have confidence in what you believe in, have humility to listen to somebody else, because you’re not a one-person show. This is the Congress of the United States."
Then the squabble between Nancy Pelosi and The Squad.
After The Squad was the only four Democrats to vote against an immigration bill, NP stated in a NYT interview "All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they don’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got."
AOC's chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti made things a lot worse. "Pelosi claims we can’t focus on impeachment because it’s a distraction from kitchen table issues. But I’d challenge you to find voters that can name a single thing House Democrats have done for their kitchen table this year. What is this legislative mastermind doing?"
He also called the Blue Dogs "New Southern Democrats" and tweeted about them "They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s."
A few months later, he quit that position.
