Fight! Fight! Fight!

Winning and Losing and Nancy Pelosi

I don’t want to get into the weeds on this budget vote, which I wish people would stop referring to as the “CR” because no one knows what that is. What it is is a vote on whether to stop Republicans from passing a budget that would permit DOGE to further obliterate America’s federal government, but in doing so, risk being blamed for the resulting shutdown of that government. For coverage of what’s actually happening, read my colleague Ed Kilgore and TPM’s Josh Marshall, who last night reported that even the nation’s biggest federal workers’ unions would prefer that Dems force a shut down over letting Elon run wild, since, as the letter Marshall cited read: “AFGE members have concluded that a widespread government shutdown has been underway and has been since January 20th and will continue whether senators vote yes or no.”

Right. That is correct and should already be clear to every Democratic senator deciding what to do. But this whole process has me thinking about what it means, politically, to win or lose. Or in contexts like this one, in which “winning” isn’t on the table for Democrats, what it means to step up versus step back, to take a risk versus be careful. More broadly, it’s made me consider the strategic character of the modern Democratic party: what it has valued and how it perceives strength and how the flinty and much lauded leadership style of Nancy Pelosi—the very thing that some frustrated Democrats have been missing this week—perhaps led it astray.

As leader, Pelosi was legendary for her commitment to winning. “Just win, baby!” was her mantra, borrowed from legendary Oakland Raiders coach Al Davis. Hyper focus on victory prompted her to make tactical decisions that appeared egoless but in fact burnished her reputation: in the years when Republicans painted her as a commie-lefty-San-Francsico-limousine-liberal puppeteer and bogeyman, rather than pushing back against these characterizations, Pelosi would encourage her members in conservative districts to throw her under the bus in order to just get the votes; win the district; win the seat; get closer to the majority. She was famous for whipping votes, counting votes, bringing a bill to the floor as soon as she knew had the votes and never bringing anything to the floor if she didn’t. Winning was all.

It was a stance that conveyed muscularity, a spine of fucking steel, and she tended to her public profile through theatrical flourishes: ripping up a Trump speech, throwing an expensive scarf around her neck, walking out of the White House with sunglasses on. Even her daily food intake—chocolate ice cream for breakfast and a hot dog for lunch…every day—suggested something ruthlessly superhuman about her; she would triumph even over basic bodily and nutritional realities.

Me, I was never a Pelosi superfan. But I acknowledged the kind of rugged aplomb she brought to the difficult job of herding the cats of the Democratic congressional caucus. There was something gobsmacking about her level of impregnability. I interviewed her once, and it was one of the worst conversations I have ever had as a reporter, because this woman was simply not going to utter a single off-script syllable. “It’s like you’re a tree, and they’re peeling the bark right off you,” she said in that conversation, cautioning the new generation of female lawmakers then entering her caucus about the kinds of challenges that awaited them in public life. She’d had the bark peeled off her, she was saying, and she was still standing. And sure, there was something slick and shiny and easy to cheer there, in her performative sunglass-flicking gestures of competence and control, the suggestion that she was there to fight, to win, and thus to keep you safe.

But she did not keep us safe. We are not safe. And what has the legacy of years of refusing to lose a vote taught the party she led about how to fight for something you are not guaranteed to win? Where is the muscle memory of how to go to the mat for principles, for ideas, for policy or material gain when a clean victory is not actually a possibility?

I have been thinking a ton about the rise of the Tea Party, and how starting in 2010, this hyper-conservative faction of the right knocked off a bunch of moderate Republicans and decided to start voting—over and over again—to defund Planned Parenthood. This tactic was absolutely batshit according to most political metrics: first, Planned Parenthood was massively popular; more popular than either party or any presidential candidate. If you had polled Americans and taken your milque-toast cues from the results—as Democrats have been doing since the Clinton administration—you would never have launched an attack against one of the most beloved entities in the country and expected to gain from that. Second, and this was of course part of the strategy, these votes were destined to fail. Obama was in the White House, Democrats controlled the Senate (at least in theory). Yes, that meant that there was no chance that the constant agitating to defund Planned Parenthood was going to work and that Republicans would have to pay the electoral price. But through a Just Win Baby lens, the insistence on continuing to vote on a losing measure, over and over and over again, should have been a sign of weakness. It definitely wasn’t.

In being willing to fight and get beaten on something—even a massively unpopular thing that no one really wanted—the Tea Party was using muscles that Democrats have allowed to atrophy: right wing lawmakers were showing their base, and their opponents, an eagerness to bare their teeth, sustain injury, risk humiliating defeat, and in doing so, present themselves as warriors on behalf of some principle, idea, piece of policy that (to them) was worth losing for.

In 2024, Democrats ran on warnings that Trump was going to destroy our democracy and now that he and his team are very much in process of doing just that, these same politicians are questioning whether or not to stand up to him and his party, at one of the first opportunities they have to meaningfully do so. It’s ludicrous, but it’s because they’re obsessing over all the angles from which their efforts might lose something for them, and they’re not wrong: everything at this point is a losing proposition. But what will capitulation without a fight win them?

These lawmakers are the closest thing the American people have to a powerful layer of protection, representation and advocacy against an administration that is taking political prisoners, kidnapping green card holders from their homes for the act of protest; Trump’s right is punishing law firms, news outlets, universities and entire states for actions they don’t like; they are dismantling labor, education and environmental policy and are going to let us all burn; they want to annex Canada.

Yep, a government shut down might mean that they do more of all that but I think it is abundantly clear that they are going to do more of it whether the government is shut down or not. A party that at least tries to stop them could convey something crucial about itself: a drive, a commitment, a willingness to take a hit in service of something bigger and more urgent.

And that’s crucial when your base, your voters, regular citizens are the ones out there right now taking their own real risks: protesting, calling representatives, publishing critical journalism, quitting their jobs, occupying car dealerships, doing economic boycotts and continuing to speak out against a terrifying administration that any day might classify not owning a Tesla as terrorism. These ordinary people know that just winning, baby is not currently an option, but they also understand that not doing anything isn’t either.