Pelosi makes big decision: ‘There’s a life out there, right’?
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the attack on her husband, Paul, by an intruder in their family home made her think about staying on as the House Democratic leader because she “couldn’t give them that satisfaction” of intimidating her out of politics.
But Pelosi said yesterday she was ready to step aside and felt “balanced” about her decision to make way for a new generation of leaders.
She’s staying as the Congresswoman of San Francisco but has no plans to endorse a successor or meddle with the new leaders.
“I have no intention of being the mother-in-law in the kitchen saying, ‘My son doesn’t like the stuffing that way,”’ Pelosi said in a wide-ranging interview with reporters at the Capitol.
“They will have their vision, they will have their plan.”
As for the future direction of the House Democrats, she said: “That’s up to them, I want it to be whatever they want it to be.”
Pelosi, who is 82, spoke to reporters after she announced her decision to step down after 20 years as the party leader. Her action followed the midterm elections that gave Republicans control of the House.
First elected in 1987, when there were just 12 Democratic women in Congress, Pelosi said she chose to wear white to deliver her speech on the House floor yesterday in a nod to the suffragettes.
The Speaker would not say exactly when she made her decision to step aside. She keeps a close hold on her most important decisions, and even now, once it had spilled out in the open, said how she finally arrived at her choice was something she might have to think more about.
It was known she took two versions of her speech home with her for review Wednesday night.
“I, quite frankly, personally, have been ready to leave for a while,” she said. “Because there are things I want to do. I like to dance, I like to sing. There’s a life out there, right?
“I don’t feel sad about not having a leadership position . . . . I feel balanced about it.”
She has said the attack on Paul Pelosi, who suffered a fractured skull when an intruder broke into their home weeks before the election searching for her, had weighed on her decision. But she said yesterday that it had the “opposite effect” from what some had interpreted.
“It made me think again about staying,” she said. “I couldn’t give them that satisfaction.”
Had Democrats been able to retain majority control of the House, she indicated, that too might have prompted a different outcome.
Pelosi said her husband of nearly 60 years continues to recover from the assault — the intruder struck him in the head with a hammer — but that the road ahead is long.