The other day, Nancy Pelosi—the longtime Democratic Congressional leader and the first and only female Speaker of the House—announced that she will not seek reelection next year. Unless she retires before this term is up, Mrs. Pelosi, who is also one of the most successful investors of her generation, will be just shy of 87 years old when she returns home after 40 years in Congress and a lifetime in and around politics.
Because Pelosi was the first woman Speaker and because she has been the face of Congressional Democrats for so long, many in the mainstream media are calling her decision not to run for another term the “end of an era.” I beg to differ.
While Nancy Pelosi’s tenure in office may be coming to a close, the era in American politics that she helped inaugurate is nowhere near finished. Indeed, after this past week’s off-year elections, it has new life and new momentum. Pelosi may be leaving Congress, but this is not the end of her era. It is, rather, the end of the beginning of her era—“the Pelosi Era.”
Just over three months ago, I used this space to heap considerable scorn on former President Barack Obama, whom I blamed for helping to inaugurate the “total state” in American politics. “In 2008,” I wrote, “Americans were given implicit permission to hate one another for their differing ‘values’ and to see one another exclusively as friends or enemies in accordance with those values.”
Obama, I continued, “took the political and cultural degeneration of the previous two centuries and made the acknowledgment and application of that ‘ruin’ socially acceptable, if not socially mandatory.”
It is important to note, however, that Barack Obama and his divisiveness did not emerge onto the political scene fully formed, like Athena springing forth from the forehead of Zeus. They were part of an overarching trend in American politics that began in earnest a full six years before his election.
Dating the beginning of a historical epoch is always difficult, often far more so than identifying its end. Nevertheless, the current epoch can likely be said to date from November 14, 2002.
On that day, the House Democratic Caucus convened to choose a new leader. Its then-leader, Dick Gephardt of Missouri, who had been in that position since the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Revolution of 1994, had just announced that he was leaving the House at the end of the term to make a second run for his party’s presidential nomination.
Although the Democrats officially had three candidates to choose from that day, in reality, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio was little more than an afterthought. The race came down to the then-62-year-old Pelosi and 32-year-old Harold Ford, Jr., of Tennessee.
Pelosi and Ford were both potential “firsts” in the minority leader role: the first woman or the first black man. Needless to say, the Democrats chose the older, more experienced, and more polarizing Nancy Pelosi.
It’s easy to forget, now nearly a quarter-century removed from this epic clash, but back in 2002, the Democratic Party was nowhere near as monolithically “progressive” as it is now. Pelosi and Ford represented opposite ends of the Democratic political spectrum.
She was a San Francisco Democrat in every sense of the term: a wealthy, patronizing, blame-America-first leftist from a secluded progressive enclave, who loathed her political opponents and judged them in moral as well as political terms.
He, by contrast, was something else altogether, as the famed black journalist Jack E. White noted shortly after Ford’s loss to Pelosi:
“Unlike Pelosi, a savvy but utterly predictable liberal, Ford would have been, in his own words, ‘hard to put in a box.’ Republicans would have had difficulty pigeonholing a black, 32-year-old, three-term Congressman who voted against Bush’s tax cuts but in favor of such conservative perennials as the prayer-in-school and anti-flag-burning constitutional amendments and repeal of the death tax.
He thinks it’s time for Democrats to stop ‘telling people what they already know’ about the shortcomings of Bush’s policies and propose some ideas of their own.
What truly distinguishes Ford and his fellow Generation X black politicians from their forebears in Congress and elsewhere is not simply their willingness to take moderate or even conservative stands on issues such as school vouchers or capital gains taxes. Rather, it’s the realism of their aspirations for winning higher offices that older black politicians could only dream of.”
If Ford had won that race against Pelosi, or if he had won the 2006 contest for a U.S. Senate seat from Tennessee (which he lost by roughly 2% to Republican Bob Corker), the Democratic Party would undoubtedly be far different from what it is today.
For starters, Pelosi and her noxious progressivism would never have taken over the party.
Additionally, and more to the point, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Ford, from either position, could very easily have usurped Obama as the nation’s first black presidential nominee and president.
While Ford has not been immune from controversy since he left Congress and would still have been a Democratic chief executive, it is highly unlikely that he would have been anywhere near as far left as Obama, much less as intentionally racially divisive.
Of course, in the spirit of Marc Antony, today, I come to bury Nancy Pelosi, not to praise Harold Ford.
Unfortunately, given the scope and depth of her influence on her party and on American politics more generally, she cannot be buried nearly deeply enough.
She will be remembered as an extremely gifted politician and an even more gifted Congressional leader.
Whereas Republicans are constantly complaining about being betrayed by their own members in the House, who often cross over and vote with the Dems, thwarting their leaders, Pelosi rarely had that problem. She ran a tight ship, and everyone in her caucus knew better than to cross her.
The groupthink that dominates the institutional Democratic Party now is very much a byproduct of her reign.
Indeed, the main reason she won way back in 2002 and Harold Ford lost is that the party was trending her way already.
Still, I think it’s more than fair to say that Nancy Pelosi had a profound impact on the country. She changed American politics permanently—and for the worse.
And while she may head home—either to her mansion in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco or her vineyard in Napa—her influence will live on. And on. And on.
