Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
NANCY PELOSI’S ANNOUNCED exit from the political arena has triggered a fusillade of brickbats and accolades. None of it is surprising. Throughout her political career, Pelosi has served as Rorschach test and lightening rod. Revered and reviled in roughly equal measure, she has been one of the most polarising forces in US politics.
Democrats will lose a fearless leader, a peerless strategist and the most consequential House Speaker in modern US history. Republicans will lose their most effective fundraiser. Pelosi has ranked first amongst liberal bogeymen, scaring corporations and social conservatives into emptying their wallets into the GOP’s bottomless coffers. Luckily for them, Zohran Mamdani is waiting in the wings.
On Pelosi’s watch, the Democratic Party passed its most significant legislation since the Lyndon Johnson Great Society era.
For decades, Pelosi functioned as the House Democrats’ spine, sinew and cerebral cortex. And, when necessary, its muscle.
Almost all of the tributes and the epithets that followed her announcement refer to Pelosi’s ‘hometown of San Francisco’. It’s less a factual error than a misunderstanding of who she is at her core.
Over the years, people in Pelosi’s inner circle would chuckle as they observed the caricature of an effete San Francisco elite, championing liberal causes while sipping wines from Gavin Newsom’s vineyard, both of them wealthy beyond most of America’s wildest dreams.
All of the above may be true but the key to understanding Pelosi, several of her longtime political allies advised, is to remember she comes from Baltimore, not San Francisco.
She learnt the rough and tumble art of politics from her father, who ruled Baltimore’s national and local political scene for more than two decades, first as Congressman and then, for twelve years, as Mayor. The family kitchen doubled as a backroom for Baltimore city politics for the first decade of her life. She learnt how to count votes on her father’s knee.
The Baltimore toughness ran like a leitmotif through her career – and Ireland was a major beneficiary. In April 2019, less than three months after she regained the Speaker’s gavel, she used it to knock the British Conservative leadership back in line when the prospect of a return to a hard border threatened to derail the Good Friday Agreement.
Before arriving in London for a meeting with Theresa May and Boris Johnson, she walked across the Derry-Donegal border, flanked by fellow Irish American stalwarts Congressmen Brendan Boyle and Richie Neal.
The symbolic gesture and headline generating photo-op was underpinned by tough talk in London. Trump, who supported Brexit, promised a favourable bilateral trade agreement with the US; Pelosi lost no time in reminding Theresa May and Boris Johnson who was really in charge when it came to talking trade deals.
When we last spoke eighteen months ago, she recounted the Westminster encounter in detail, delivering her parting shot with relish. “We told them ‘forget it. It ain’t going to happen. You mess with the Good Friday Accords and the border issues and you ain’t got nothing.” Her ‘fugheddaboudit’ ultimatum achieved its goal; there was no further talk of restoring a hard border.
She has strong Irish connections – every summer for decades, the Pelosi clan would decamp to a holiday home in Wicklow. Three of her grandchildren were baptized at the parish church in Kilquade.
Throughout her career, Pelosi has always sought to apply persuasion before pressure. But she makes her business to know and locate the pressure points of foes and friends alike, something that has helped her to push and pull Democrats – and some Republicans – over many a legislative hurdle.
“You don’t have the votes,” she scoffed at Trump repeatedly during his first term, when he sought to impose his will on Congress. And repeatedly, she was proven right.
She was wrong, however, in her prediction that the Democrats would win the House back in 2024.
They may have lost by the narrowest of margins. But in a Republican-controlled Congress that has abandoned any pretence at serving constituents rather than Trump, whether Democrats lost by two seats or two hundred is close to irrelevant.
More than any other politician of her era, she balanced the competing demands of political idealism and realism. Without Pelosi, the Affordable Care Act, the single most significant achievement of the Obama era, would never have made it onto the statute books.
It didn’t fix America’s healthcare system – not by any measure. But it ensured that tens of millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions as well as those who could least afford healthcare could be covered.
She knew there would be a price to pay for this achievement – dozens of Democrats lost their seats and Republicans controlled the House for the next eight years. It was a huge political sacrifice in furtherance of a bigger goal, one unlikely to be replicated by either party in an era where self-promotion and political survival have suffocated the notion of public service.
Pelosi’s ability to read any political room ensured any challenges to her leadership were stillborn but it was Trump’s election in 2016 that fuelled her political comeback. The stage was set for an epic four-year showdown between the rookie outsider and the consummate insider. It quickly became clear that his bluster and bullying was no match for her decades of political experience.
The more she outmanoeuvred him, the more enraged he became.
Following 2019 White House meeting, his press secretary released a photo that showed a standing Pelosi confronting a seated Trump across a conference table, surrounded by two dozen military officials, congressional leaders and cabinet members, all of them male, all of them seated.
Trump released the photo with the caption ‘Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown.’ Pelosi recognised it for the Rorschach moment it was, and coopted it for her Twitter and Facebook pages, turning the photo into an avatar and rallying call for Democratic resistance.
She seemed to delight in taunting Trump. During an interview in her office eighteen months ago, I asked her about a comment she had made in 2020 where she professed concern the health risks Trump faced because of his ‘morbid obesity’. Was it a deliberate attempt to rile him up? “Well no,” she responded with a chuckle. “I think I was just stating a fact.” “I think he’s in a limbo dancing competition with himself to see how low he can go she added.
Sources close to her say her biggest regret is the inevitable rupture of her fifty-year friendship with Biden.
It was Pelosi who delivered the coup de grace that ended his delusional bid for a second term. The “Et Tu Nancy?” moment pushed Biden out of the race but the damage was done.
Always determined to exit the political stage on her own terms, her response to the would-be challengers snapping at her heels in the San Francisco district she’s represented for 20 terms is vintage Pelosi.
Had she chosen to run again, she says, she would have beaten any of them. “It’s not arrogance. It’s competence. I know my district.”
There’s a symmetry of sorts to her retirement. While Congressional Democrats were adrift on a sea of anomie and self-loathing Newsom, her protégé and relative through marriage, became the leader of the Trump resistance.
The two-term governor of California’s mix of liberal elitism and pragmatism and the unabashed glee he takes in poking and provoking Trump takes an entire chapter out of the Pelosi playbook.
It’s too soon to say whether it’s enough to land him the Democratic nomination in 2028 but it’s certainly catapulted him to the front of the pack.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say