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Pelosi told the stunned real estate agent that the deal was off. As unhappy as she was at her mother-in-law’s house, she refused to live in any place that had been, as she put it, “made available by the election of Richard Nixon.”
Her success was testament to an important part of her skill set: the ability to see opportunities where others might not, and the brazenness to seize them.
“I was brought up to believe that all people are God’s children, and the last time I checked, that included gay people,”
Pelosi emerged from the room beaming her clenched-teeth grin, and a cheer went up from behind her. Before the bank of TV cameras that had been set up, Bonior handed her the big, black leather whip that had hung in his office. It was thick and ugly, a gleaming, braided snake coiled into a lasso-like circle. Pelosi clutched it with both hands as she faced the assembled media. For the first time, she was a leader of her party in the House. For the first time, a woman had cracked the ranks of the top leadership of Congress.
It was far from the first time she’d been the only woman in the room. But it suddenly hit her that she wasn’t just the only woman in this room, at this moment. She was the only woman ever to be part of a meeting between the president of the United States and the leaders of the legislative branch.
For two-hundred-plus years of American history, from George Washington to Bill Clinton, presidents had been meeting with Congress to plot the course of the nation. Hundreds of combinations of lawmakers had participated in those meetings, making the decisions that determined the country’s fate—whether its sons would be called up to fight in another war, how to save its farmers from drought and depression, the healing of the nation’s sick and the education of its children. And until she got there, every one of those decision makers had been a man.
Obama had galvanized a coalition that was young and diverse—the future of America—as he promised to erase the old divisions and heal the wounds of not just the nation but the planet. It was time to put away the old hatreds and culture wars: America had elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama.
At one of Pelosi’s press conferences, reporters asked how she planned to proceed. “You go through the gate,” she said. “If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”
As Obama signed the bill, Pelosi stood behind him. A hot microphone caught Vice President Joe Biden summing up the legislation’s import: “This is a big fucking deal.”
vote. Pope Francis addressed Congress a few days after their meeting, delivering an urgent plea for “cooperating generously for the common good.” He called on the lawmakers to embrace immigrants, heal the environment and end the death penalty. As the pontiff spoke, tears of joy streamed down Boehner’s face. That night, the Speaker went home and told his wife he had made up his mind to quit.
The meeting was a sign of things to come. In a single stroke, the president had shown himself to be an insecure, narcissistic liar who lived in an alternate reality, as well as someone who believed that only white people were truly American.
McConnell’s personal unlikability never seemed to factor into this narrative; his “accomplishments” consisted of blocking popular legislation, carrying water for Big Business, and twisting the rules of the Senate to ensure that Obama couldn’t get anything done.
that. While attendance at Trump’s inauguration had been sparse, the following day, the streets in DC, across the country, and around the world filled with women, making the Women’s March the largest single-day protest in American history.
While Trump blundered and raved, it was Pelosi who was giving Washington a master class in the art of the deal—from what ought to have been the most powerless position in congressional leadership.
Returning to the Capitol, she marveled at the president’s wall fixation. “It’s like a manhood thing for him,” she told her colleagues. She had tried, she said, to avoid stooping to his level, which she colorfully described as “a tinkle contest with a skunk.” Instead, she said, “I was trying to be the mom.”
On the right side of the floor, the shrunken group of Republicans, a nearly uniform horde of white men in dark suits, sat motionless, while the Democrats rose to applaud. Their side of the House was a riot of color, dotted with women’s bright dresses. They were male and female, black and brown and white and Asian, gay and straight, young and old—AOC, at twenty-nine, was the youngest congresswoman in history. From above, a lei, a cowboy hat and a hijab could be seen. Many had brought their children—they cradled infants in their arms or shushed restless grade-schoolers. It was the most diverse
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“Nancy Pelosi is a woman of faith,” Jeffries said. “A loving wife. A mother of five. A grandmother of nine. A sophisticated strategist, a legendary legislator, a voice for the voiceless, a defender of the disenfranchised. A powerful, profound, prophetic, principled public servant, and that’s why we stand squarely behind her today. Let me be clear: House Democrats are down with NDP—Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi—the once and future Speaker of the United States House of Representatives!”
Pelosi’s daughter Christine said the gesture took her back to adolescence: “She knows. And she knows that you know. And frankly she’s disappointed that you thought this would work.”
The irony of Pelosi’s position was that in the area she wanted to focus on, policy, she couldn’t accomplish much beyond symbolism; in the area she wanted to downplay, oversight of Trump, she actually did have the power to do things with the House alone. At the same time as the House investigated Trump’s many scandals, she was negotiating with the administration to revise NAFTA, seeking bipartisan deals on prescription drug pricing and infrastructure, and working to achieve a budget agreement—sometimes to howls from the left, which thought any engagement with Trump threatened to “normalize” his
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Pelosi quickly responded to Trump’s tirade: “When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” she tweeted. Suddenly Democrats were unified again
“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,”
If she hadn’t been certain before, the call sealed it. It was crystal clear that the president had no sense of right and wrong, and that he would keep putting the nation at risk if nothing were done. Even Nixon had had the good sense to know when he’d been caught. Trump was thumbing his nose at the Constitution, a document he didn’t even understand.
As I came to know and study Pelosi, I grew to admire her—as a leader, as a woman, as a historic figure, as a human of remarkable and specific talents. That’s not to say I agree with her ideologically; I am not a Democrat or a liberal (nor am I a Republican or a conservative). But covering politics in this day and age is enough to make you yearn for leaders who seem to know what the heck they are doing.
