Good riddance, Nancy; you’ll also be missed.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the House and first woman to lead a major political party in Congress, announced her retirement today. It’s been a long time coming. As Joan Didion, another iconic Californian who, like Pelosi, stuck around long enough to become both an institution and a meme, put it in her most famous essay: “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair.”
Pelosi, who first assumed office in 1987, and led the House Democrats from 2003 to 2023, leaves behind an objectively remarkable political career.
She is a one-woman political dynasty: A 1 of 1 who harkens to a bygone age, when most Americans believed that this country’s political institutions could stand the test of time, correcting flaws slowly but steadily. Joe Biden, another avatar of that bygone age, dubbed her the “most consequential Speaker of the House of Representatives in our history.”
Pelosi fits the mold of the classic San Francisco liberal: A fighter for queer and reproductive rights, a dove who voted against both the Gulf War and the Iraq War, but also a firm believer in capitalism and our Constitutional democratic process, flaws and all. And while many of the bills she pushed across the finish line could be seen as half-measures, nobody worked the system better than Pelosi.
Credit where it’s due: Pelosi was famously effective at coordinating non-legislative “constituent services” for the districts she represented, and she had her hand in a majority, if not all, of the most contentious political moments of the last 20 years. Pelosi helped end George W. Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security in 2005. She pulled votes out of thin air to save Obamacare in a 2010 bipartisan effort.
The viciousness of the far-right in 2025 only underscores how unique Pelosi was for so long: Here was a Democrat who could get things done by sparring — and sometimes collaborating — with the other side, not to mention the many factions within her own party. That doesn’t even seem possible in the scorched-earth Congress of today.
Pelosi was a thorn in the side of President Donald Trump from the start, literally clapping back in public and, behind the scenes, kicking the legs out from under his stimulus effort in 2020, which might have raised his approval rating and possibly changed that year’s presidential election. But Pelosi also showed her acumen for measured responses, like when she brokered a trade deal that earned Trump’s support. Here was a speaker who knew how to employ the proverbial carrot and the stick for compromise, even if it meant accomplishing far less than what had been possible. It was her way of doing business.
We may never know if Pelosi regrets past strategic and tactical decisions, especially when working with the left wing of not just Congress, but America more generally. I don’t mean this metaphorically: she refuses to talk about regret. Other than her insults about Trump, Pelosi is famously stolid when speaking in public. Her biographer Molly Ball suggested to Vox that Pelosi’s need for control may stem from her early years battling for respect as a woman in politics. Pelosi learned that power is the only thing that creates change, and that power in Congress is only accumulated through hustling the opposition, not just talking about it on Twitter.
Her “wins” were complicated, though. Was the aforementioned trade deal a loss for American and Mexican workers? Did she throw out Medicare for All under the guise of defending Obamacare? Did she mock the Green New Deal (“or whatever,” as she called it) in favor of expanding fossil fuel drilling? Did she kill college debt cancellation after meeting with a “billionaire power couple”? Did she repeatedly piss off the progressive wing of the party with half-measures?
Yes is the logical, but not quite nuanced, answer to all of these questions. Frankly, I’m less interested in policy analysis than asking what has made Pelosi so outdated in our current moment.
The answer feels pretty simple. She’s not able to be the thing the Dems need most: a charismatic populist.
Don’t take it from me: biographer Ball points out that she is not a natural storyteller. Being able to tell a story to voters is the one skill shared by wildly disparate figures like Barack Obama and Trump. Pelosi was an operator, but no one’s idea of an orator.
Pelosi’s largely centrist position didn’t stop the right from painting her as a Commiefornia caricature. My advice would be for the next rep to lean into that, and sell their politics with everyman verve.
In other words, our next rep needs to have populist energy: a no-bullshit, transparent approach that critiques the establishment and wealthy elites. In New York City, we watched Andrew Cuomo get buried by not just the very articulate Zohran Mamdani, but Republican Curtis Sliwa, who garnered an unlikely bipartisan fandom by not just hating billionaires and courting the working class, but also feeding the meme machine with charming quotes.
Using populist talking points isn’t some radical strategy; in SF, Congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti is already doing that. In comparison, State Sen. Scott Wiener seems like Pelosi redux. If Mamdani fever is any clue, people want a convincing, charismatic leader, the kind of politician who says “with all due respect” before shanking their opponent and throwing up a middle finger at the status quo.
Pelosi, and the context in which she grew her power, will be missed by countless San Francisco liberals with capital and a centrist streak. But the air of smug complacency, their unquestioning embrace of the free market, and a failure to uplift the working masses is exactly what helped create the political mess we’re mired in.
Pelosi’s retirement is a good first step towards saying goodbye to all that.
