“Nancy doesn’t have much patience for people who don’t know what they don’t know.”

That was what a senior congressional Democrat close to the speaker of the House told me when I asked what Nancy Pelosi really thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Pelosi was famous for having what POLITICO once described as “an iron fist in a Gucci glove.” There was no better example of that than her dealings with the Squad, the quartet of progressive women elected in 2018. 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.

Allies of Pelosi compared AOC to Bernie Sanders, the nominally independent Vermont senator: a leader with a vision, but not a legislator who could build the sort of coalitions necessary to get much done in Congress. 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.

A few weeks after the Squad had arrived in Washington, Pelosi described what her message was to the new members of the Democratic caucus. “I say to them, as advocates, outsiders, it is our nature to be relentless, persistent, and dissatisfied,” she told me. But that’s not enough once you’re elected, she went on. “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.”