In 1985, Nancy Pelosi ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and lost. The contours of that fight are long forgotten, save for one detail that became central to Pelosi’s mythology. Amid a heated contest, Pelosi alleged that a higher-up at the AFL-CIO who supported her opponent had called her an “airhead.”
The accused denied it. There’s no proof that he said it, but if he did, Pelosi was right to denounce it as sexist; everyone knows that men are not called airheads. And besides, you couldn’t choose a less fitting disparagement of Nancy Pelosi, a shrewd political operator whose decades-long congressional career testifies to an innate political intelligence. If the labor leader really said it, he was not only sexist but a poor judge of character.
Reporters have occasionally resurfaced the airhead incident throughout Pelosi’s political career, which she announced on Thursday will come to a close with her retirement at the end of her current term. For her, the episode is emblematic of the sexism she faced on her ascent to Speaker of the House and during her decades of Democratic Party leadership.
No doubt the obstacles Pelosi faced as a woman in politics were considerable, and a sexist remark from a union leader in the mid-’80s isn’t hard to imagine. Still, few have thought to ask why she was feuding with the labor establishment in contention for the DNC chairmanship in the first place.
As it turns out, the battle lines of that contest were historically significant and highly revealing, speaking volumes about the political legacy Nancy Pelosi will leave behind when she retires after thirty-seven years in Congress. As Pelosi herself said of the airhead episode, “There’s nothing as, shall we say, revealing as having an intra-party fight.”
Pelosi’s debut in Democratic Party politics was holding a fundraiser at her home in San Francisco’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood. She was already known around town, appearing…
Auteur: Meagan Day
