Nancy Pelosi biography reveals depths of her tone-deafness

On November 8, 2016, Nancy Pelosi told interviewers she had 
complete confidence that Hillary Clinton was about to be elected 
president. Having been House Speaker from 2007 to 2011, she had 
the distinction of having held the highest rank of any woman in 
United States history, but “I’m counting the minutes to 
relinquish that title.”

With President Hillary safely ensconced in the White House, 
Pelosi planned to retire from elective office. Perhaps she’d 
take an ambassadorship. She thought the Vatican would be a good 
fit for her. In her new book Madam Speaker, which is built 
around ten lengthy interviews of Pelosi, Susan Page dryly notes 
that at 76 (today she’s 81), Pelosi was already “Well past the 
retirement age for almost every workplace except Congress.”

Instead: President Trump. Like many Democrats, Pelosi insists 
that her personal neurotic feelings are somehow relevant to the 
questions of politics and policy, and when Trump won, “It was 
actually physical,” she says in the book, “like a mule kicking 
you in the back over and over again.” Pelosi’s feelings were 
badly hurt by America’s decision, but, hang on, she also would 
have us believe she’s tougher than average: “Every day I’m like, 
don a suit of armor, put on your brass knuckles, eat nails for 
breakfast,” she says. If that’s true, why can’t she control her 
feelings? All these years later she’s still incensed that Time 
magazine never put her on its cover through her entire first 
tenure as Speaker, though John Boehner made it in 2010.

Pelosi emerges in the book as tone-deaf, petty, narcissistic, 
self-deluding, obtuse (she attended the March on Washington but 
left before the “I Have a Dream” speech) and hectoring (this is 
a word President Obama used to describe her, according to Page). 
The book attempts to be straight-up hagiography but even so some 
jaw-dropping details emerge. My favorite anecdote is the one-
sentence mention of the time when Pelosi, in a Jeep full of some 
or all of her five children, actually managed to flip the thing 
over “several times.” Luckily, no one was hurt, apparently. Page 
doesn’t tell us any more about this incident.

Early in her career in the House (a longtime Democratic party 
fundraiser in San Francisco, she won her seat in a special 
election after Congresswoman Sala Burton died in 1987), Pelosi 
saw an elderly House member hobbling around with a cane, Pelosi 
said, “It’s never going to be me.” She told people she intended 
to stick around as long as her dad Tommy D’Alesandro had in the 
House- maybe 10 years.

But it’s hard for a megalomaniac to walk away, even when she 
hurts her party. (When she was a housewife back in San 
Francisco, she thought, “I have enough time, I could do 
something — like feed all the hungry people in the world.” 
Sure.) Pelosi was upbraided by fellow members after the 
notorious Marie Antoinette moment when, at the depths of the 
coronavirus crisis, she appeared on late-night TV to show off 
her two $24,000 freezers stocked with $13 pints of ice cream, 
then later broke California laws to visit a hairdresser. The 
book, quoting the Post’s front-page headline, “DESSERT STORM,” 
notes that as her party unloaded on her, Pelosi, “admitted no 
fault and acknowledged no regrets. In that way, she bore a bit 
of resemblance to Trump.” Ouch.

Pelosi is vindictive: Recently retired Senator Harry Reid called 
her to support a member of Congress who wanted a committee 
assignment from Pelosi, but she replied, “Not a chance in hell.” 
Why? That member had “voted for Steny, not once but twice.” This 
would be back in 2001 when she and Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, her 
longtime rival since they both worked in the same Congressional 
office in their twenties, had both run for Democratic Whip. (By 
the way, Page found that when they were both Congressional 
staffers in the same office — she was a secretary, he was an 
assistant — she made twice as much money as he did.)

Pelosi was caught off guard when the writer asked to see her 
school transcripts. Barbara Bush, a previous Page subject, 
graciously allowed this. Pelosi’s reaction? “She looked 
appalled, as though I had asked to rifle through her closet.” 
She insisted, “I’m a very private person.” Er, isn’t she 
literally a career public servant? Pelosi wasn’t much of a 
student, it seems clear. She is quoted in her high-school senior 
yearbook as saying “I haven’t opened a book yet.”

Pelosi is such a control freak that she would demand her four 
daughters dress alike (“Okay, everyone white pants and yellow 
turtleneck”) and such a political animal that when she found the 
perfect house to rent in San Francisco, having moved there from 
New York City in 1969 with her husband Paul and their kids, she 
backed out of the deal when she found out the owner was a 
(liberal) Republican who was leaving to go work in the Nixon 
administration. She told her flummoxed real estate agent “I 
could never live anyplace that was made available because of the 
election of Richard Nixon.”

Pelosi, we learn from the book, is a liar (in 2009, during a 
furor about harsh interrogation techniques during the War on 
Terror, she falsely stated she didn’t know about them, but she 
had been fully briefed on the waterboarding back in 2002). She 
is a dissembler — she won the nomination to her House seat by 
4000 votes after targeting the few Republicans in her district 
with a mailer stating, “The individual tax burden is too high. 
We need a representative who will fight all efforts to raise the 
personal income tax.” (President George W. Bush used to joke 
about this, saying that while Pelosi claimed to love low taxes, 
“She must be a secret admirer.”)

She loses her mind over the silliest stuff (she became “enraged” 
when a fawning profile of her ran in the San Francisco Examiner 
under the headline “Not Just a Party Girl” — which was 
appropriate because she was known both for throwing parties and 
being head of the state Democratic party).

When asked whether she hated Trump, she replied, “I don’t hate 
anybody. And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ 
in a sentence that addresses me.” Huh? She called Trump “the 
most dangerous person in the history of our country.” At the 
2020 State of the Union, which took place after Pelosi had 
launched her doomed impeachment, Trump handed her a copy of his 
speech but she got mad before he even started speaking because 
he wouldn’t shake her hand. Why would she want to shake hands 
with someone she evidently reviled and had just impeached? She 
snubbed Trump by introducing him without the traditional 
language (“I have the high privilege and distinct honor of 
presenting to you the president of the United States”). Instead, 
shattering a norm, she merely said, “Members of Congress, the 
president of the United States.” (The previous year, Pelosi’s 
famous sarcastic-applause moment came when Trump said, “We must 
reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution and 
embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise and 
the common good.” You show ‘em Nancy, down with cooperation!)

At the 2020 address, she proceeded to end the evening with a 
historically petulant display of childishness when she ripped up 
Trump’s speech. Her defense of this is that she didn’t have a 
pen so she made little tears in the pages that she wanted to 
come back to, supposedly because they contained “lies, 
misrepresentations and untruths.” She does not cite a single 
untruth in the book but “my members were furious. You could see 
steam coming out of the caucus” because Trump “used the 
Congress, the House chamber, as a reality-show set.” Yet even 
Page has to concede that Pelosi’s temper tantrum was “the most 
public display in modern times from the leader of one branch of 
government to another.” [sic: Pelosi was not the leader of one 
branch, merely of one half of one branch]. Pelosi fan Ruth 
Marcus chided her in the Washington Post: “There is no out-
Trumping Trump.” Mike Pence, standing imperturbable next to her, 
applauded and completely ignored her preschool-level theatrics.

But then again Pelosi has always been a bit of a drama queen. 
Back in Baltimore, where her machine-politician dad was mayor, 
she used to be driven to school grandly by the mayor’s driver. 
Daddy used to arrange to have municipal boats used named after 
her and she would christen them in the harbor while posing for 
pictures that would run in the paper. A college classmate (she 
went to Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC) notes 
that when others were discussing political principles, she was 
more interested in political power — as in how to acquire it. 
What 20-year-old kid is such a brazen machine pol?

Pelosi’s obliviousness to the effects of what happens when she 
goes out to create drama were highlighted during a Congressional 
trip to China in 1991 where she and others unfurled a banner in 
Tiananmen Square reading “To Those Who Died for Democracy in 
China” in Chinese and English. “It caused an international 
incident, as she knew it would,” Page writes, acknowledging that 
the stunt also earned her camera crews a beating from Chinese 
guards for filming it. She gets the publicity, the little people 
get the bruises.

That’s how Princess Nancy has seen her role since the days when 
her daddy was king of Baltimore. Representing a large, diverse 
party is a different story. Pelosi is so bad at her job that 
it’s no wonder that her biggest fans are Republicans. RNC 
staffer turned White House spokesman Sean Spicer told Page, 
“Nancy Pelosi was literally the best gift that Republicans had, 
especially in terms of fund-raisng. I mean, we owe her a special 
debt of gratitude for the amount of money that she was able to 
raise for us.”

Never retire, Nancy.

https://nypost.com/2021/04/18/nancy-pelosi-biography-reveals-
depths-of-her-tone-deafness/