At 83, the former House speaker just might buck another trend — the one suggesting octogenarian lawmakers should hang up their spiked heels.
that’s triggering a vicious cycle with retail and other places of business, and a downtown ill-equipped to absorb the work-from-home transition due to its lack of residential enclaves.
Of more immediate interest to the political set here are Pelosi’s plans.That’s because she’s holding back“Ask her one question: When is she announcing?” Brown told me. Much is weighing on Pelosi’s mind. There’s the issue of California’s power outage in Washington, there’s New York taking advantage of that prospect and there’s the needs of her city in its fragile state.
Whether to run again, however, is also intensely personal for Pelosi. That’s in part because it’s an open secret that one of her four daughters, Christine, is eager to claim the seat and because San Francisco’s disorder landed all too literally on the family’s doorstep last year. Known for being almost entirely apolitical — and happier in San Francisco and Napa than Washington — Paul Pelosi surprised his wife, and me, by showing up at the last event of the day: a fundraiser the former speaker headlined for vulnerable House Democrats.
It was when he said the “done” part that I noticed his wife’s hand clench his in that way spouses do when they want to quietly convey something to one another, in this case: Please don’t say anything more on that topic to this reporter. She did it by uniting, at least for her purposes, the city’s rivaling Democratic cliques; by co-opting her most formidable opposition bloc soon after that first race; and by mostly avoiding local kingmaking to preserve friendships and alliances across the city.
California, Boxer told me, “opens its arms up, to women and to people who weren’t born there,” and the alchemy of natives and transients who bring a convert’s passion is potent. There was the charming Italian grandmother, calling everyone from the newly naturalized custodian in her district office to the park ranger at the Presidio “darling.”
After a bit of hemming and hawing about a study of the topic and Republican obstructionism, Pelosi finally offered what she called “a direct answer to your direct question: Right now, no, I don’t see that.” Pelosi was defensive when I wondered if, having left the congressional leadership, she could now focus her attention more fully on helping the city that elevated her in its time of need, a sort of full circle ending to her career.
No topic animated Pelosi that day more than the delicate matter of California’s frail, 90-year-old senior senator. This may come as a surprise to close students of San Francisco politics, who know that the speaker and the senator were more neighbors than friends. Feinstein could be forbidding and, seven years her senior, had been mayor for nearly a decade before Pelosi’s first run.
Pelosi’s point, though, was that Feinstein “is an iconic figure” and deserves better than the treatment she’s gotten from the press and even those Democrats urging her to resign. Which is where it got personal for the former speaker, who knows from both gendered criticism and questions about when she’ll retire.
What’s less publicly known is how personally involved the elder Pelosi has been in arguing that Feinstein be allowed to decide for herself if she wants to remain in office. She went on a bit about what Feinstein has meant to California when I had the temerity to ask if, given that legacy, she ought not to have retired gracefully.
“How can I say this immodestly, or modestly: that’s what I’ve been hearing constantly, constantly,” she explained.As in: the Pelosi daughter whose life, as Willie Brown put it, “has been devoted in preparation” to succeeding her mother and who appeared at two of the stops we made.This time I explained that I was being a smart-ass and Pelosi briefly insisted she hadn’t discussed the matter with her daughter and would-be political heir.
What’s not commonly understood is Pelosi was more closely aligned with the Burton organization’s rival, Leo McCarthy, at that time the lieutenant governor. “She gets that, in San Francisco, the differences are smaller and that you’re maybe with people on an issue one day or not with them and then you’re going to be with them again,” said Leslie Katz, a former city supervisor who snagged a rare Pelosi endorsement. “And so she’s never conducted herself in any way that really creates that kind of schism.”
“Through Ronald — not really politically but just going to church and all this — I got very close to Leo McCarthy, and Leo McCarthy was, if anybody was a mentor to me, it would’ve been Leo,” she recalled. “People say: ‘Oh, Phil Burton was your mentor.’ Phil wasn’t, we screamed and yelled at each other.”
“We had our Nonna Brigade,” the former speaker told me, recounting how her mother-in-law and “some of her Italian woman friends would call all these places.”
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