When Rep. Nancy Pelosi first became speaker of the House, I got a call from a reporter from a DC paper; I think it was Roll Call. He wanted to know what someone from a liberal San Francisco publication thought of the new speaker’s “San Francisco values.”
Right-wing politicians and pundits around the country were going crazy. Some progressives were overly excited. A speaker from (gasp?) San Francisco, that crazy left-wing city? She must be some kind of political freak, maybe even a commie.
I told the reporter the everyone on all sides needed to chill out. Pelosi was by no means a “San Francisco leftist.” She was a very mainstream Democrat who hadn’t represented San Francisco in years; her constituency was the leadership and members of the Democratic Caucus in the House. She was all about raising money from rich people to elect Democrats, even right-wing Democrats, to keep her party and herself in power.
“I’m a San Francisco leftist,” I said. “Nancy Pelosi is not.”
Well, this stirred up quite a storm, and I got my 15 minutes of right-wing talk show fame. Sean Hannity called. Laura Ingraham called. They were fascinated by the idea that someone in San Francisco though Pelosi was too conservative.
I told them I wasn’t the only one.
When Pelosi ran for Congress, she had no local political experience except raising money for the Democratic Party. She was handpicked by the old Burton Machine to make sure that Sup. Harry Britt didn’t become the first gay Democratic Socialist to represent San Francisco in the House. Also: Harry was independent of the Machine, and not prone to cozying up to rich people. He almost won.
Pelosi did some fine work in Congress. She helped the party control the House in critical years. She helped pass the Ryan White Act during the depth of the AIDS crisis, and she was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care act across the goal line (although she never considered a single-payer Medicare for all system). She famously tore up Trump’s State of the Union speech on live national TV.
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But she showed only disdain for the left wing of the Party, ignoring and belittling AOC and the Squad, dismissing the Green New Deal as “the green dream, or whatever they call it, and helping ensure that Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t become the party’s nominee for president.
She never, ever, suggested that raising taxes on the very rich to the levels of the 1960s was a good idea. Meanwhile, she and her husband made millions in the stock market.
Many of her constituents today have no memory, or were too young to remember, or were not in town back then, but in 1995, Pelosi pulled together a group of corporate leaders to turn the Presidio, which had just become a National Park as the Army moved out, over to a private trust with the goal of making enough money to become self-sufficient.
No other national park has ever had to pay its own way. That’s not how national parks work.
But Pelosi and the corporate crew in essence privatized the park, allowing George Lucas, among others, to build luxury office space in a federal enclave that was exempt from city taxes and fees. Lucas alone cost the city $25 million.
At the time, federal law required surplus housing to be made available to unhoused people. That never happened at the Presidio, where refurbished military housing was, and is, rented at high rates to rich people.
So let’s celebrate her career as the first woman speaker, a very effective legislator, a leader in the Democratic Party—and look forward to an election next year where economic inequality might be a serious issue. But let’s not forget her real record.
