Nancy Pelosi refused to endorse Hillary after bitter feud with 'corporate sellout' Bill Clinton, reveals book
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who recently faced a massive backlash for displaying her personal ice-cream reserve, is considered a ‘rich and arrogant limousine liberal’ who is cut off from people, a new biography has revealed, according to Daily Mail. It was said that even her own Democratic Party was opposed to the idea of electing her as the speaker in 2018 because her rich status made her less popular. The 80-year-old representative from California served as the speaker between 2007 and 2011 before being elected again in January last year.
According to the Mail report, Pelosi, who has a net worth of almost $60 million, was seen as somebody who ‘looked down on unwashed masses from her San Francisco mansion' (or DC penthouse).
The veteran faced such allegations back in the 1980s also when she began her career in the Congress because her husband Paul is a multimillionaire who has a real-estate and venture-capital firm. The duo also owns a sprawling vineyard in Napa where they organize weekend parties with high-profile people like former chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt.
Pelosi has had a bad relationship with the Clintons
The uncomfortable details about one of America’s richest women politicians came out in the new book 'Pelosi', penned by TIME’s national political correspondent Molly Ball. She also said that Pelosi had a two-decade-long feud with the Clintons - one of the country’s top political families.
The feud had its start when Bill Clinton was the president (1993-2001). He had backtracked on a promise made to Pelosi to hold China responsible over human rights issues. Pelosi, according to Ball, felt more humiliated for having trusted the president. Pelosi accused Clinton of 'coddling dictators' in his approach to Beijing. Following this incident, she began viewing Bill as a 'corporate sellout'.
Pelosi’s entry into the political circles happened relatively late as she took her first public position after bringing up five children on the San Francisco Library Commission in 1975. Her family came from Italian-Americans from Baltimore and her father was Rep Thomas D’Alesandro Junior, who later went on to become the mayor of Baltimore. Her brother Thomas D’Alesandro III took over the post later.
After she entered politics, Pelosi went through the ranks of the Democratic Party in California and took the House seat in 1987 vacated by the death of Sala Burton. Ball wrote that before her life in politics began, Pelosi lived an elitist life and her staff members also had initial problems getting accustomed to her elegant lifestyle. They soon found however that Pelosi also knew business and harbored a strong stand.
To give an example, Ball wrote in the book how the Democrat invited a farmworker organizer to a launch that was hosted by pharma company Procter & Gamble and let him grill the giant’s CEO on the issue of importing coffee from El Salvador -- a controversial issue at the time. Ball writes it was 'typical Pelosi: ballsy, confrontational, even b***hy'.
Pelosi's stands on AIDS patients' rights and China made her famous
Pelosi, who was among th handful of women in the House at the time of her entry made a name by fighting for the rights of AIDS patients but it was her strong stand on China that made her internationally known. It was Clinton’s U-turn on putting pressure on China’s human rights records that brought Pelosi to clash with the Clintons.
During the 2008 presidential election, Pelosi decided against endorsing Bill’s wife Hillary. It was not only because of her relation with the Clintons worsened since Bill’s reluctance to fight China but also because Pelosi admired Obama’s ‘political instincts’. She also annoyed the Clintons by saying that if the Democratic Party’s superdelegates elected Hillary and not Obama, it would harm the party.