Nancy Pelosi, liberated and loving it
It’s not a pretty sight when pols lose power. They wilt. They crumple. They cling to the vestiges. They mourn their vanished entourage and perks.
How can their day in the sun be over? One minute, they’re running the world, and the next, they’re in the room where it doesn’t happen.
Donald Trump was so freaked out at losing power that he was willing to destroy the country to keep it.
I went to lunch with Nancy Pelosi at the Four Seasons to find out how she was faring now that she has gone from being one of the most powerful women in the world — second in line to the presidency — and one of the most formidable speakers in American history to a mere House backbencher.
I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.
Pelosi was not crying in her soup. She was basking as she scarfed down French fries, a truffle-butter roll and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts — all before the main course.
She was literally in the pink, ablaze in a hot-pink pantsuit and matching Jimmy Choo stilettos, shooting the breeze about Broadway, music and sports. Showing off her 4-inch heels, the 82-year-old said, “I highly recommend suede because it’s like a bedroom slipper.”
Fans dropped by our booth to thank Pelosi, and women in the restaurant gave me thumbs-ups, simply because I was sitting with her.
“I wonder, Maureen, girl to girl, I keep thinking I should feel a little more, I don’t know,” she hesitated, looking for the right word. Over the course of our conversation, she said the word was “regretful,” and she thought about it in church and during morning and night prayers, but she just wasn’t feeling it.
“It’s just the time, and that’s it. Upward and onward. I’m thrilled with the transition. I think it was beautiful.”
Her daughter Alexandra Pelosi, a documentary film-maker, assured me that it’s not an act. “I can tell you, in my 52 years of being alive on this Earth, I have never had the kind of weekend I’m having right now,” she said last Sunday. “My mother is at peak happiness. I’ve never seen her like this. It’s like she’s floating through the air. It’s fascinating for my kids because they don’t know this person.
“I think you want to enjoy being old. I don’t think you want to spend your final days fighting with Kevin Mccarthy about how many seats you get on Appropriations,” she said.
Before I could broach the humiliating spectacle of Mccarthy abasing himself to the loonies on the far-right and being tortured by preposterous Matt Gaetz, Nancy Pelosi brought up her successor.
She looked at me, her brown eyes widening, and said, “I’m sad for Kevin that he couldn’t do that in a way that brought a little more dignity to the House of Representatives. It’s strange.” She added, “What happened was inexplicable.”
The woman is, as her friend and fellow California lawmaker Anna Eshoo said, “satin and steel.” I tried to keep a straight face at Pelosi’s satiny solicitude. She had, after all, called the Jello-spined Mccarthy “a moron” in 2021 after he criticised the Capitol physician’s mask mandate.
I dryly asked the devout Catholic if she was praying for Mccarthy, the way she once prayed for her nemesis Trump.
“Yeah, I was, because I was praying for the House,” she said. “It was just stunning that he wouldn’t be ready. You know what your challenges are. Just be ready.
What they were seeing, whether they realised or not, was an incredible shrinking speakership.
“Really, in order to even honour — ‘honour’ isn’t the word — in order to recognise some of the requests that were being made, you have to have the leverage to get the job done.
They were undoing his ability to do what they were asking him to do. That was most unfortunate. I don’t want to see the job turn into something else. It has to be the speakership.” Did she give Mccarthy any advice? Yes, she said; before the first vote, when he seemed confident, she told him, “Get it done.”
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“IT’S JUST THE TIME, AND THAT’S IT. UPWARD AND ONWARD,” PELOSI SAID OF THE END OF HER LEADERSHIP ROLE