THE GREATEST

Perhaps it’s because I am Aspergian and enjoy examining the details, but I have always been interested in how the machine operates. And I have always been impressed by those who know how to use the machine - whatever kind it is - at its best power.

In politics, I have always been interested in the process. How to do it. The “sausage making” that Otto von Bismarck famously suggested voters should never get a look at. And I have always been fascinated by the sausage-makers.

“Politician” is a word those who don’t know what they’re talking about use as a term of put-down. But if it weren’t for the great politicians, we wouldn’t be where we are; where we’d be would be unimaginably worse.

Probably because I wasn’t any good as a political glad-hander, when I did work in politics you could find me in the back room, tweaking the throttle on the machine and wiping the metaphorical grease from under my fingernails. The crew chief who kept the pilot from having to take to his parachute when it didn’t work. And it was a pleasure to do that.

In English history, I find William Pitt the Elder and his time in power when he invented what the office of Prime Minister of Great Britain would be, as interesting as any tale Shakespeare told. Also Pitt the Younger and how he used his mastery of Parliament to lead a country that was knocked a bit askew by its loss of North America to pick itself up and defeat Napoleon. The 20-year battle over the Reform Bill of 1832 and the creation of what would become modern Britain is recreational reading to me. Gladstone and Disraeli are more interesting to me than any sports competition ever.

In America, the story of how Thomas Reed of Maine created the modern congress is high drama to me. The creation of the New Deal is my version of Oscar-worthy high drama. Harry Truman’s mistake in not calling Korea a war and what that led to is a tale worth telling.

I am glad I was able to both know Jesse Unruh, the inventor of the modern state legislature, and listen to his stories of political skulduggery as he went about taking care of getting the things the people he’d grown up around as a poor boy in the Central Valley needed. It was always interesting to watch Willie Brown, the best operator of a modern state legislature, pull off the tricks he did in the service of making things better for the people he’d grown up with as a poor kid who picked cotton in Texas. Both went far beyond their backgrounds, but never forgot where they came from and why they’d decided on this vocation.

And so I bring all that to my feelings about Nancy Pelosi, who also never forgot where she came from.

It’s really simple: she was The Greatest of All of Them. She knew that one hundred percent of what is possible is always the goal, something that the political illiterates never figure out. It takes discernment to know what that is.

Like Pitt the Younger, she grew up in politics and learned all the valuable lessons from her father, Baltimore’s greatest mayor. As she recalled in her farewell today, she was five years old when she first stood on the floor of the House of Representatives. Thinking about that scene, if one were writing a Great Heroic Myth, that would be the foretelling of the hero’s greatness.

I’ve told the story of how I first saw her skill, when she “read the room” for me at that political fund-raiser in San Francisco back in 1974, when all the rest of the crowd thought of her as the sister-in-law of my boss’ political ally of the time. That she was “just a homemaker.”

But after that, nothing she ever did in politics surprised me in the least.

Like all great politicians, she was and is no one to cross, as even the World’s Dumbest Moron finally figured out. Like all the greats, she only had to slit a throat once, and the victim (Steny Hoyer) not only thanked her but became her loyal lieutenant afterwards. But the lesson was not lost on anyone, and no one ever came at her again.

Her mastery of the House and its intricacies is written in the titles of the bills she saw become law: The Affordable Care Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the list goes on.

And then there’s the moment when she stepped beyond all other contenders in American political history for the title of The Greatest Speaker. January 6, 2021. The day she saved this constitutional democratic republic, while being hunted by the traitors. That footage of her taking charge while in the “secure site” is for the ages. Hopefully there will never ever be anyone else who can contend for the title, since we will be fortunate that such a terrible day never again happens. She was born to step into that cockpit and wield the power necessary to prevail. That’s the finale of the Great Heroic Myth foretold when the child stepped onto the House floor. That she would save it.

And like all the really great, the true masters, she knew when to step back. Going out on top, at the height of her powers and success, with victory won in the face of a defeat expected by all. All but her.

There are very few times when one can be fortunate to see a True Giant. Of all the politicians I have read of, all the politicians I have observed in my life, she is The Greatest. My favorite of all. I’m glad I was alive to see her at work.

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