Right Voices

Nancy Pelosi leads the Democrats with a fiery style that could make her the first woman Speaker of the House

Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House, portrays herself as a polite, grandmotherly lady. Don’t believe it for a second. Would your grandmother ever say, “If people are ripping your face off, you have to rip their face off” (Pelosi’s approach to handling attacks from Republicans)? How about “If you take the knife off the table, it’s not very frightening anymore” (her explanation for why she won’t let voters forget George W. Bush’s unpopular Social Security proposal from last year)?

Once in Congress, she was embraced especially by liberal Democrats. She opposed the Gulf War and in a 1996 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle said, “I pride myself in being called a liberal” and “I don’t consider myself a moderate.” In 2001, on the strength of the votes of party progressives, Pelosi won an intense battle with Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, who is more centrist, to be the No. 2 Democrat in the House. A year later she defeated another moderate, Martin Frost of Texas, to become the party’s leader in the chamber.

In both contests her opponents argued that Pelosi was too liberal, and she hasn’t forgotten. Her relationship with Hoyer is tense, and when Pennsylvania Representative John Murtha said he would run against Hoyer for House majority leader if Democrats won this fall, Pelosi did little to dissuade him. When Frost, who is now out of Congress, unsuccessfully ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee last year, Pelosi repeatedly rebuffed his attempts to get her support. While she declines to discuss those conflicts, Pelosi told TIME, “Anybody who’s ever dealt with me knows not to mess with me.” Pelosi carries a chip on her shoulder, believing that fellow Democrats and media élites have constantly underestimated her political ability, dating back to her unsuccessful effort to become head of the Democratic National Committee in 1985, when she was called an “airhead” by a labor-union official. She will talk about those political battles only vaguely but told me the Democratic establishment in Washington “couldn’t control me, so they needed to take me down” and “They can’t even believe the fact that I’m going to become Speaker, but they’re getting used to it.”