Speaker of the House-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader-elect Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) talk to the media.
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Knowing that also explains why the lefty caricature that Republicans paint of Pelosi has never quite stuck. Hers is not the loopy liberalism of San Francisco, where you can be branded as a right-wing extremist if you vote, as Pelosi once did, for cracking down on rave parties. The politicians in her family were progressives of a rougher cut, rooted in the Depression and the New Deal and in doing things for desperate people who turned to the government when there was nothing else for them to do.
You also didn't last long in big-city machine politics if you buckled at the first sign of a fight. When Big Tommy once threatened to fire striking garbage workers, Jimmy Hoffa himself sent an emissary to tell the mayor he wasn't happy. As D'Alesandro's former press secretary Tom J. O'Donnell recounted the story to the Washington Post, "The mayor spoke up and said, 'You go back and tell Mr. Jimmy I'm very unhappy with the garbage piling up on the streets of Baltimore, and I'm not going to stand for it.'" The following Monday, most of the garbagemen were back at work.
That fighting philosophy has defined Pelosi's leadership style as well. Her predecessor Dick Gephardt was known as "Ironbutt" for the hours he spent sitting and wheedling his colleagues. "Gephardt would plead with people to do the right thing, and they would know that there was no penalty for it," recalls a veteran senior aide on Capitol Hill. Not Pelosi. "Once you cross her," he says, "your life is not going to be very pleasant."
The Speaker-to-be puts it in more graphic terms. At lunch with a group of TIME correspondents a few months ago, she said Republican attacks on her would not work, because she wouldn't let them. "If people are ripping your face off," she said, picking at a chicken salad dressed only with lemon wedges, "you have to rip their face off."
• THE ROAD AHEAD
It was not entirely clear that Pelosi would ever make the family business anything more than a hobby. After graduating from an all-girls Roman Catholic college in Washington, she married Paul Pelosi, whom she met at summer school at Georgetown University and who would eventually make a fortune in investment banking and real estate. They moved first to New York City and then to San Francisco. Pelosi had five children in six years. Between diapers and laundry, she raised money for Democrats and ultimately became the state-party chairwoman.
But it turns out she was compiling a favor file of her own. Not only was she a prodigious fund raiser in a state that functions as a political ATM for Democratic candidates across the country, but she also helped bring the national convention to her city in 1984. In 1987 she decided to run for the seat left vacant by the death of Sala Burton, the widow of Phillip Burton, who had run his own storied political machine. One of Sala's final acts was to give her endorsement to Nancy Pelosi.