THE ROAD TO POWER
Long before she presided over the US
House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi presided over a house of five children. It was excellent preparation for dealing with Donald Trump, writes Ellen McCarthy.
Last month, Nancy Corinne Prowda was watching television when her mother, Nancy Pelosi, came on the screen. Pelosi had disinvited President Donald Trump from giving his State of the Union speech in the House while the Government was shut down, and the President responded by effectively cancelling her planned trip to a war zone. So, a reporter asked, was Trump trying to get revenge?
“I don’t think the President would be that petty,” Pelosi deadpanned. “Do you?”
Prowda immediately had flashbacks to her childhood. “I knew the face,” she says. It was the face that used to greet Prowda and her siblings if they had, say, skipped out on chores or sneaked into a movie they weren’t allowed to see. Pelosi’s reprimands were rarely loud, but often withering.
“You children wouldn’t have done that,” Pelosi would say. Calmly, knowingly.
“It made you feel worse, because of course we had done it,” Prowda recalls. “She has a way of delivering her message to the intended without rubbing their face in it — without directly telling them why she’s so disappointed. It’d be better if she’d just get mad at you.”
Long before she presided over the US House of Representatives, Pelosi presided over a house of five children in San Francisco. Back then she was just another outnumbered parent, trying to figure out how to rein in a brood of wily kids using a combination of love, leverage and Jedi mum tricks.
There was no master plan to develop skills that would later be useful in politics. It just happened, day in and day out, as she toiled in the experience that she saw — and still sees — as the most exciting, exhausting, important work of her life.
Pelosi credits that chapter of life with making her into the leader she is today: perhaps the most powerful woman in American politics and the first to hold the Speaker’s gavel. And she hopes that society will begin to view parenting as “a gold star” on any professional resumé.
“That’s one of the hardest things,” she says. “Makes going to work look easy, doesn’t it?”
Now, at 78, Pelosi is still at work, and her political skills and parenting instincts are being put to their greatest test. A stubborn, capricious Trump stalks the White House. The new Congress is teeming with energetic, defiant youngsters. The House is divided. And it’s Pelosi’s job, once again, to keep it from devolving into chaos.
PELOSI’S ORIGIN story focuses on the future speaker not as a mother but as a daughter. She was born Nancy D’Alesandro, seventh child and only daughter of Anunciata and Thomas D’Alesandro jnr. “Big Tommy” was a Democratic congressman and then three-time Mayor of Baltimore. At their home in Little Italy, Nancy learned what it meant to dole out and call in favours, to serve a community and take care of constituents.
But Pelosi insists her parents weren’t her biggest influence. “I was really forged by my kids,” she has said.
She married her college sweetheart, Paul Pelosi, in 1963. A year later, they had their first child. By the end of 1970, they had five — four daughters and a son.
There was no flood of stories about the impact being a parent had on Paul Ryan and John Boehner when they took the gavel. But if a House Speaker spent a decade of their early life as a football quarterback or Navy Seal, those years would certainly be mined for meaning and relevance. Pelosi’s leadership training took place inside her home and the experience, she insists, fundamentally changed her.
“I became so energised and efficient in the use of time and willing to delegate, to the children, responsibilities,” she says. “It really shapes you. There’s no question.”
Five babies in the span of six years meant that — out of necessity — Pelosi’s organising skills shifted into high gear. She set up an assemblyline lunch station, where the children made their own sandwiches and packed their own snacks.
I’m the mother of five, grandmother of nine. I know a temper tantrum when I see one.
Nancy Pelosi