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California: Eighth District Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) Last Updated July 14, 2003
On February 20, 1915, Governor Hiram Johnson and Mayor James Rolph led 150,000 people onto the grounds of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to see the Spanish-Italian baroque style building built on reclaimed land in what became San Francisco's Marina district. The Exposition ostensibly celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal, but it was clearly intended to show off San Francisco's recovery from the 1906 earthquake. It also spotlighted San Francisco as the central focus of an America that was becoming, with its acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines and its interest in an open-door policy with China and trade with Japan, a power in the Pacific. The Exposition set the physical style of San Francisco: It encouraged the use of Mediterranean color, accent and detail that characterizes most post-Victorian houses and commercial structures in The City (as the San Francisco Examiner called it for years). It created the picturesque Marina district, whose old buildings were among those damaged in the 1989 earthquake, and today's tourist waterfront around Fisherman's Wharf and Ghirardelli Square. This San Francisco has many facets: On a sunny day it looks almost tropical, with brown mountains baking in the sun and light shining off the pastel stucco buildings; when the clouds scud in from the Pacific, it can look sinister, full of dark corners where a private detective's partner might be ambushed by a pretty girl. The buildings can be majestic, like the monumental Beaux Arts City Hall, or tawdry, like the hotels of the Tenderloin; it is a city that looks exotic at first but, when you look closely, can only be American. San Francisco has been a dynamic city, capable of great growth, carrying the American tradition of tolerance of diversity to new lengths; it grew from nothing to a major city in the single year of 1850; its American origins are obvious from the regular grids of streets named after politicians and local developers. The San Francisco of 1915 was proud of the writers who had flourished there--Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris--and of the home-town traditions of the arts and crafts movement, just as San Francisco later would have a Herb Caen-ish pride in the beats of the 1950s North Beach, the hippies who thronged Haight-Ashbury in 1967, and the gays of Castro in the 1970s and since. Over the years, the city's booming economy, based initially on food processing, but now on finance, high-tech and clothing (Levi Strauss, The Gap) attracted talented newcomers, weighted increasingly toward those who find its liberation-minded cultural attitudes congenial. Politically, San Francisco was a progressive Republican town, like the two men who led the way into the Exposition. The sour-tempered Hiram Johnson made his name as a reformer throwing out crooked city politicians; his administration gave California primary elections, referenda and recall, and strong civil service laws. "Sunny Jim" Rolph, mayor from 1911-30 and then governor, built the civic center, parks, schools, streetcars and the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct--the antique infrastructure of San Francisco today. Sympathetic to the conservation movement, willing to deal with organized labor in a union town that had America's only general strike in 1934, tolerant of the diversity of California, these progressive Republicans were the recognizable ancestors of, though certainly not identical to, the San Franciscans who in the 1970s and 1980s became increasingly liberal and even radical. But San Francisco's hipness can be overstated. For if its distinctive style attracted liberal singles and gays in increasing numbers, its economic dynamism on the Pacific Rim has attracted Asians--as indeed San Francisco did from 1850 until immigration was shut off by the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The city has elected strong liberal politicians--notably, Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were shot to death in 1978 by a political opponent who was acquitted of murder by a liberal jury on the bizarre theory that he had been crazed by junk food. Over the next decade, the city's cultural liberalism was tempered by Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who vetoed a gay marriage ordinance and opposed commercial rent control. In 1995, Willie Brown, ousted after 15 years as speaker of the Assembly, returned home and was elected mayor. After reaping admiring publicity following his takeover of the office, Brown's record turned dismal. While the affluent neighborhoods were enriched with new Silicon Valley millionaires, the Chinese, Filipino and other Asian immigrants in the southern and western parts of the city were beleaguered by high taxes that supported the pampered public employee unions. After winning praise for Operation Scrub Down to clean the downtown streets but sparking protests in 2002 for his crackdown on the homeless, he was not eligible for reelection in 2003. The 8th Congressional District takes in four-fifths of San Francisco, all but the southwest corner. It is the smallest in the state in land area and the most densely packed. It has all of San Francisco's high-rise downtown, the crowded and bustling Chinatown, Telegraph, Nob and Russian Hills, North Beach (which was once really a beach), Pacific Heights (which is still on heights) and the Marina District (which does not have a very big marina). In the valleys are the mostly black Fillmore and Western Addition areas; the 8th is 9% black, 16% Hispanic and 29% Asian--the second highest Asian percentage of any district outside Hawaii. The 8th also has the gay Castro district and Noe Valley, Haight-Ashbury, once the bedraggled center of hippiedom and now another yup-and-coming San Francisco neighborhood, and Portrero Hill with its restored houses overlooking downtown. Farther south are the old residential areas overlooking I-280, with pastel houses strewn along grid streets that hug the steep hills. The district is overwhelmingly Democratic: George W. Bush won an anemic 15% here in 2000. The 8th District is represented by Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat with deep political roots and enormous ambition, who was elected in June 1987. She has the energy and shrewdness of one who has handled the most delicate political chores and the charm and unflappability of one who is the mother of five children. Pelosi grew up in Maryland; her father, Thomas D'Alessandro, served in the House from 1939-47 and was mayor of Baltimore for 12 years after that, and her brother, Thomas D'Alessandro Jr., was mayor from 1967-71. Married to a successful San Francisco businessman, she was California Democratic Party chairman in the early 1980s. Since the 1960s, San Francisco's congressional politics were dominated by Phillip Burton, an old-fashioned labor-liberal Democrat. But Burton died in 1983 and his widow Sala, elected to succeed him, died in 1987. With death-bed encouragement from Sala, Pelosi ran and won 35%-31% in the special against gay supervisor Harry Britt. Pelosi has taken the lead on important issues of local sensitivity. One is human rights, especially in China. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, she sponsored an amendment to give Chinese students the right to remain in the United States; George Bush vetoed it. In 1991 she became the lead sponsor of the bill to condition China's Most Favored Nation status on human rights reforms; the House overrode Bush's veto but it was upheld in the Senate. After that, Pelosi led the annual fight against PNTR and sharply criticized China. "I don't believe in the concept of trickle-down liberty. Economic reform does not necessarily lead to political reform," she said, arguing that the Chinese make concessions not when the U.S. bows to their wishes but when it threatens to walk away. She said that Bill Clinton was either in denial or ill-informed about what's going on in China. When President Jiang Zemin visited Washington in 1997, she termed the White House state dinner shameful and attended a stateless dinner hosted by actor and pro-Tibet activist Richard Gere. When Clinton two years later agreed to terms for China's entry into the World Trade Organization, Pelosi led even more furious opposition to PNTR. Although bitter about the setbacks, she vowed to maintain her human rights vigil. She has done all this at some political risk: Pelosi's position is by no means universally popular with Asian Americans in her district; many think the U.S. should trade and negotiate quietly with China. One of her chief adversaries on the issue is her San Francisco neighbor, Senator Dianne Feinstein; their houses are just a few blocks apart. In addition to working with some Republicans on China, she usually cooperated with chairman Porter Goss as the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, especially after the September 11 attacks. She joined in the committee's final report that, while the intelligence community did not have specific evidence in advance, it did have information that was clearly relevant to the attacks, particularly when considered for its collective significance. On other issues Pelosi has an almost perfectly liberal voting record. She has used her Appropriations seat to get money for victims of AIDS. She has worked to restore welfare for legal immigrants, and has supported needle exchanges. She has been a leader in encouraging family planning and environmental protection overseas. In 2001, when California suffered an energy shortage, she unsuccessfully sought to force federal regulators to impose temporary price caps on wholesale electricity prices. At home, Pelosi has been re-elected by huge margins. Although she turned down Dick Gephardt's entreaties to lead the DCCC, Pelosi remained a strong partisan. In hopes that Democrats would regain House control in 2000, she ran a vigorous campaign against Steny Hoyer to become majority whip--raising more than $3 million for her party's candidates and agreeing to head a major fundraising push among non-members. Although she was not running "as a woman," she said, "the fact that I am a woman is an enhancement because we absolutely must have diversity in the leadership." Unfortunately for Democrats and Pelosi, who stood a good chance to win, Republicans kept control and Tom DeLay remained majority whip. When David Bonior decided in 2001 to run for governor of Michigan, she and Hoyer revved up their leadership bids again--this time in a contest to succeed him as minority whip. Pelosi, who was a close ally of Bonior, criticized the party's handling of the 2000 campaign, and said that Democrats needed to refocus on grassroots organization, money and message. Supporters played up her potential to become a celebrity--"a glamorous grandmother who knocks people off their feet," as Representative Neil Abercrombie put it. With nearly unanimous support from the 32 California Democrats, and showing that she knew how to whip and count her supporters, Pelosi won the October 10 vote by a convincing 118-95. As whip, Pelosi moved quickly to assert herself, sometimes independently from Gephardt. She sparked controversy when she contributed $10,000 to Lynn Rivers in a redistricting-forced Michigan primary against John Dingell--the ranking Democrat on Energy and Commerce who had been a strong supporter of Hoyer for whip. Normally, party leaders do not take sides in such elections. Dingell, who tends to seek retribution for slights against him, handily won the primary. Her biggest conflict came in fall 2002 when she actively encouraged opponents of the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, which Gephardt had enthusiastically endorsed with President Bush at the White House. Pelosi contended that supporters had not made the case for using force, and that she had seen no evidence that Iraq "poses an imminent threat to our nation." To the surprise of many, her efforts helped to secure 126 Democratic votes against the resolution, while only 81 backed the position of Gephardt, which also was endorsed by Democratic Caucus chairman Martin Frost. In retrospect, that split was a compelling signal of the transition underway in the Caucus. Even before the Election Day votes were counted, Pelosi began making telephone calls to members seeking support to replace Gephardt as Minority Leader if he stepped down. Once the disappointing results were in, Pelosi had all but locked up the support of a majority of the caucus. After Gephardt said that he was stepping down two days after the election, Frost announced his candidacy with warnings that the selection of Pelosi might create a "permanent minority party;" he withdrew from the contest a day later, conceding that he could not win. Harold Ford made a belated, quixotic bid designed to appeal to a combination of blacks and New Democrats, but in the November 14 vote, Pelosi won 177-29. Following an election that left most Democrats dispirited, she brought a burst of energy--and favorable press coverage--to a party that badly needed it. She quickly settled into the minority leader position, showing hands-on management to the initial tasks of selecting members for House committee vacancies and developing a Democratic message designed to highlight the shortcomings of the Bush agenda. There were bruised feelings over some committee assignments but even allies of Hoyer and Frost credited her with bringing a breath of fresh air and enthusiasm to party deliberations after eight years of Gephardt's control.
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