People love a feisty grandma, and Pelosi delivered
Lord, do people love a feisty grandma. Give them Ruth Bader Ginsburg, draped in her spangly dissent collar, outplanking everyone forever. Give them Hillary Clinton, but mostly the version where she’s wearing indoor-sunglasses and checking her Blackberry on an airplane. Elizabeth Warren, she of the spunky Senate floor speeches? Yes! Nevertheless, she persisted! (And then she persisted in getting her DNA tested for Native American ancestry and it was quietly agreed upon that she should persist a little less).
Give them all the older women who are cursing and twerking while wearing Helen Mirren bikinis, or talking about their sex lives, or asking about your sex life. Our culture loves meme-ing gray-haired ladies when they’re a little inappropriate.
Which is why, on Tuesday, after Nancy Pelosi dressed down President Donald Trump in a televised Oval Office meeting and sauntered out like she had to get to a lunch date with Audrey Hepburn, suddenly being proNancy became cool again in certain liberal circles.
“Seventy. (Bleeping). Eight.” gushed one fan on Twitter over a photo of the Democratic leader leaving the White House in a red swing coat and sunglasses.
Pelosi paused to explain why she’d requested that the meeting, which also included Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., continue off camera: “I didn’t want to in front of (Trump and Vice President Mike Pence) say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”
She got back to Capitol Hill and promptly snarked Trump’s border wall: “It’s like a manhood thing for him,” she reportedly told House Democrats. “As if manhood could ever be associated with him.”
Her base, judging by online chatter, loved the sass.
A few weeks ago, the fashionable argument was that Pelosi shouldn’t be in meetings representing Democrats at all. She was a dinosaur: too elderly, too corporate, too Nancy-ish to regain the title of House speaker. Let her make way for the young revolutionaries. Let her fade.
But with a few savvy moves, Pelosi this week managed to escape the brittle society-lady stereotype she had been forced into, and let herself be recast as a feisty grandma, one of the few ingratiating roles allowed women her age.
“I was trying to be the mom,” she told colleagues post-meeting, about keeping the peace between Trump and Schumer. But “it goes to show you: You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.”
This is a common enough aphorism, but it’s usually delivered with a more vulgar synonym. The introduction of “tinkle” makes it — well, rhetorically, it accomplishes a lot of things. It makes the entire quote repeatable, for one thing, guaranteeing media attention. But it’s also a self-consciously prim word. A potty-training word. The kind of word that pegs its user as simultaneously polite and saucy, and that depicts Trump as a toddler in need of pull-ups.
“Tinkle is a fun word. Haven’t heard it since I was a kid,” praised a supporter.
“Nancy Pelosi is everybody’s favorite bad--- grandma,” responded another.
As adoration of Pelosi scrolled across my screen — and readers filled my inbox suggesting that I should laud her, weeks after readers suggested I should loathe her — it felt like an illustration of a known conundrum:
The public seems to like female politicians when they do their jobs. But it dislikes them when they’re campaigning for those jobs. We apparently view self-promotion — or mere selfassertion — as unseemly.
Hillary Clinton consistently earned approval ratings in the mid- to high-60s when she served as secretary of state, higher than Barack Obama or Joe Biden during those same years. But when she ran for president, her numbers tanked. A similar thing happened to Warren, a progressive superstar at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who saw her ratings dip when she sought her Senate seat.
So on Tuesday, Pelosi was doing her job, and her fan base loved it. She was being a boss, they thought. And she was doing it in a way that was specifically feminine, in a way that highlighted her age and maternal instincts.
In a way, this was a tidy response to criticisms that she was past her prime. Do Democrats really wants to send a young, inexperienced revolutionary into contentious White House meetings? Or do they want to send a grandma?
It’s worth mentioning that Pelosi shouldn’t have had to wear the perfect coat and choose the perfect naughty phrases to become so beloved. But by leaning into the archetype, she was conveying a carefully crafted message: Everyone else around her might need pull-ups. She was experienced, and by God, she was feisty enough to take on them all.