Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards, and in high heels.
-former Texas Gov. Ann Richards
…
Washington
Ann Lewis came into last week’s celebratory tea for Nancy Pelosi with an aged campaign button on her lapel.
“Votes For Women” said the keepsake, a relic from the suffragette days when women could not vote, much less serve in elected office.
Lewis is a savvy lady, with the heart of a lion, who has spent her professional life in the trenches of Democratic politics, working for various Kennedys and Clintons.
It was while laboring for Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland a few decades back that she first heard of a petite, dark-haired scion of Baltimore’s formidable D’Alesandro clan who had gone West and carved a role for herself in California politics.
“Street smart” was the word on Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, Lewis recalled. She was a gal who tempered her San Francisco liberalism with gritty political skills learned as a daughter of one mayor of Baltimore, and a sister to another.
Now the “Itty Bitty Pretty One” of that man-ful (five brothers) and traditional Italian-American family has eclipsed them all. Last week, she became the highest-ranking elected woman in American history.
As her guests entered a stately hall on Constitution Avenue to munch on cakes and draw tea from silver urns, they were handed a new campaign button, portraying Pelosi in the classic pose of Rosy the Riveter, flexing her muscles and announcing her new title: Speaker of the House.
She grew up in the cozy streets of Baltimore’s Little Italy, in the 3rd Precinct of the 3rd Ward in what was, and may still be, the biggest small town in America.
Young Nancy went to Mass at St. Leo’s and attended Notre Dame, an all-girls Catholic school, and Trinity College here in Washington, where she met a guy and married him, moved to the Left Coast, and raised a family.
She was, by accounts, a good mom to her five children. It was only when her youngest child, Alexandra, was a senior in high school that Pelosi considered running for office. She asked her daughter if she was OK with the idea.
“Oh, mom,” Alexandra sighed. “Get a life.”
“And so I did,” Pelosi said.
Like Tip O’Neill, the last successful Democratic speaker, Pelosi cut her teeth on classic urban politics, which will serve her well in her new duties. In a harborside neighborhood of alleys and row homes, she and her brothers learned how to ask for votes, do favors, and handle constituent complaints.
Baltimore afforded a rich milieu. It’s a town that’s nurtured Runyonesque ward heelers like American Joe Miedusiewski, the magnificently pompadoured Harry “Soft Shoes” McGuirk, and the late Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro, a rotund steelworker who served on the city council. He kept a heavy, sharp railroad spike on his desk at City Hall to wave in the face of unruly visitors and reporters.
Like many of Maryland’s pols down through the years (though not the regal D’Alesandros), Mimi had a touch of larceny in his heart, which he once described in his emblematic brand of Bawlamerese: “Me, I never claimed I was no angel,” he said. “I done my share of foolin’ around and I admit it. I played the numbers and I shot craps and I was a horse degenerate. But I never done anything dishonest.”
In her first hours in power, Pelosi displayed her street smarts and skills. Gavel secured, her Democrats ruthlessly silenced the Republican opposition, and pushed new ethics and budget laws.
“There will be bipartisanship when it’s convenient to have bipartisanship,” griped Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. Otherwise, “there will be partisanship, with not a gentle hand, but partisanship by meat cleaver.”
“Shrinking violets do not get to be speakers of the House,” noted Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.
Like Lewis and many of the other Democratic women who attended the tea Donna Brazile, Lindy Boggs, Dee Dee Myers, Ranny Cooper and Debbie Dingell Pelosi made her way into the male-dominated ranks of American politics as a foot soldier, dancing “backwards and in high heels.” Her victory, she told them, was theirs, and for those who came before them, and of the female members of the House of Representatives, who gathered around her as she spoke.
“Now let us praise great women,” Pelosi said. “We’ve waited over 200 years for this.”
That Pelosi chose a wisecracking antagonist of the Bush family the late Texas governor Ann Richards to honor at the tea was not a good omen, perhaps, for the men down at the White House.
Pelosi is elegant. And precise. A grandmother. And speaker of the House.
“The most powerful woman in America,” she said as they cheered. She struck the Rosy the Riveter pose. And flexed her muscle.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Read and comment on his columns at The Denver Post’s Washington Web log (denverpostbloghouse.com/washington).
