Opinion | Nancy Pelosi: ‘It Didn’t Sound Like Joe Biden to Me’

The remarkable thing about the past couple of months in politics has been watching the Democratic Party act like something we have not seen for a long time — a political party. A party that makes decisions collectively. A party that does hard things because it wants to win. A party that is more than the vehicle for a single — usually — man’s ambitions.

But parties are made of people. And in this case, the party was in particular made of a person, Nancy Pelosi, one of the longest-serving House speakers, the first female speaker, and — it sometimes feels — one of the last people left in American politics who knows how to wield power and knows why she wants to do so.

This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

We’re talking on the day that Vice President Kamala Harris named Tim Walz as her vice-presidential pick in the campaign. He is the first former House member to be on a Democratic ticket since Al Gore. What was he like in the House?

He was remarkable in the House. He came winning a Republican seat. So he was a red to blue candidate. He came as the longest-serving noncommissioned officer in the military ever to serve in the Congress. So he was on a path of veterans affairs and the rest. He came having worked in farming as a child and so rural America was a big priority for him.