STAYING POWER
Nancy Pelosi stopped caring about what people think of her a long time ago, so she has no qualms about eating ice cream for breakfast with a stranger. Dark chocolate, two scoops, waffle cone. It’s a freezing January morning in Baltimore’s Little Italy, where Pelosi grew up in the 1950s. “You know what’s good about ice cream in this weather?” she says. “It doesn’t melt down your arm while you’re eating it.”
We are sitting in an Italian café on Albemarle Street, alone save for the staff and Pelosi’s security detail, to whom she has offered coffee. The Trump era has many Democrats in a panic, but Pelosi inhabits a more cheerful reality. She is convinced that America has hit bottom, has seen the error of its ways and is ready to put her back in charge.
The 78-year-old former House Speaker knows what her critics say about her: that she’s too old, too “toxic,” too polarizing; that after three decades in Congress and 15 years leading her party’s caucus, she has had her turn and needs to get out of the way. But there’s a reason she sticks around. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, she says, “we’d have a woman at the head of the table.” When that didn’t happen, Pelosi realized that without her, there might not be a woman in the room at all.
Pelosi is one of the most consequential political figures of her generation. It was her creativity, stamina and willpower that drove the defining Democratic accomplishments of the past decade, from universal access to health coverage to saving the U.S. economy from collapse, from reforming Wall Street to allowing gay people to serve openly in the military. Her Republican successors’ ineptitude has thrown her skills into sharp relief. It’s not a stretch to say Pelosi is one of very few legislators in Washington who actually know what they’re doing.
But few people talk about her in those terms. Instead, Pelosi is regarded as a political liability. Republicans see her as their biggest asset, and hope to motivate their voters in the midterm elections by putting her image in television ads. Meanwhile, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars she has raised for her party, nearly 60 Democratic House candidates have returned the favor by calling for new leadership. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s June 26 primary upset of one of Pelosi’s lieutenants, Representative Joe Crowley of New York, highlighted the restlessness of the party’s grassroots, and Pelosi’s erstwhile allies in the Congressional Black Caucus have pushed Representative James Clyburn to challenge her. Even the New York Times editorialized that she should go.
None of this fazes Pelosi. “If I weren’t effective, I wouldn’t be a target,” she says, working on her ice cream as leftover Christmas songs play in the background. The only part that bothers her, she says, is when women who are thinking of running for office tell her they couldn’t withstand the abuse. “I say, ‘Forget what they’re doing to me, because you won’t be that much of a target. But you will be a target, because this is about power. And if you look like you’re making headway they will come after you. And it won’t be a pretty sight.’”
The attacks on Pelosi are particularly ironic in this political moment. Since Donald Trump’s election, American women have poured into the streets, signed up to run for office in record numbers
