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 frequently in the society pages as “Mrs Paul Pelosi,” the civic-minded wife of a wealthy investor who sat on the Film Commission and the Library Commission and generally worked the donor gala circuit. At that initial political fundraiser for Democratic congressman Phil Burton, Pelosi caught the politics bug and began raising money for Burton and other Democrats in earnest.

She distinguished herself by proving uniquely adept at networking with high-dollar party donors. People took notice: Nancy Pelosi could make it rain. She joined the DNC as a member in 1976, became chair of the state party in 1981, and rose to finance chair of the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 1985. Two years later, she was elected to Congress. She took the seat of Sala Burton, the wife of Phil Burton, for whom she held the initial fundraiser. The Burtons had been the Pelosis’ neighbors in Pacific Heights.

Seen from one angle, this is the story of a mere wife (“Mrs Paul Pelosi”) who became an agentive person in her own right, rising to a position from which she could steer the course of history. From another angle, it’s the story of a wealthy person maneuvering nimbly within a Democratic Party that was losing interest in catering to its traditional base and developing a mighty appetite for elite fundraisers.

When she ran for chair of the DNC in 1985, Nancy Pelosi represented an insurgency within the party: the so-called New Democrats who sought to break apart the New Deal coalition, rein in the presumed excesses of Great Society reforms, depose organized labor from its privileged perch, and pivot the party toward a program of neoliberal economic reform, which incidentally benefited the wealthy donors with whom Pelosi had spent the previous decade becoming intimately acquainted.

Pelosi’s opponent in that race, Paul Kirk, represented the old guard. A quintessential New Dealer, Kirk had been a strategist for Teddy Kennedy, playing a major role in Kennedy’s effort to get a New Deal–style jobs creation program in the party platform over Jimmy Carter’s objections. A New York Times article on the 1985 DNC chair contest observed that Kirk was “closely identified with the kind of liberal politics that many Democrats now blame for their party’s slippage with voters,” particularly “middle-class voters” — an oblique reference to the insurgency being waged by Pelosi and the anti-populist wing, for whom New Deal– and Great Society–style anti-poverty and pro-worker programs were but dead weight.

This, then, was the context for the alleged airhead incident. But you’d never know it from anything Pelosi has said about it in the last forty years. Her reflections on the episode have completely elided her participation in realigning the Democratic Party away from its traditional pro-labor values, focusing instead on her personal triumph over sexism.

Pelosi lost the DNC chair race, but she and other insurgents persisted and eventually won the war. Whatever commitment to progressivism she entered office with (as Pelosi pointed out, the AFL-CIO leader had been “one of my friends in the movement” before the fault lines widened) dissipated as the 1990s wore on and Bill Clinton remolded the party in the New Democrats’ image. After serving in Congress for fifteen years, Pelosi ascended to party leadership — the first woman in history to do so — and spent the next several decades continuing that legacy.

The donor scene has never looked better, with spending by wealthy elites reaching record highs. The trouble, of course, is the voters: only 37 percent of Americans viewed the party favorably as of September 2025.

For many voters, the post–New Deal coalition Democratic Party has ceased to represent any particular project. Instead, it has become associated with weak half measures, technocratic workarounds, uninspiring compromises, mealy-mouthed excuses, and obvious diversions. One consequence of the neoliberalization of the Democratic Party is its forfeiture of a coherent and appealing political identity. The money flows in, but the votes flow out.

One word of appreciation for Nancy Pelosi: she is a leader. She may be retiring rather late — she will be eighty-six when her term ends — but at least she’s not planning to die at her desk like many of her contemporaries. Without a concrete project or agenda, the Democratic Party has become a professional association for individual career Democrats. If their fear of mortality manifests as a reluctance to retire, then that’s their decision; the party is here to help them retain power. Nancy Pelosi played a part in creating this state of affairs, but she seems to recognize the downsides of stubbornly maintaining public office as a means of personally taunting death.

Her role in convincing Joe Biden to exit his reelection campaign likewise testified to this awareness. It also demonstrated her decidedly non-airhead leadership capacities. As the official leader of House Democrats, Pelosi’s successor, Hakeem Jeffries, was ostensibly responsible for steering the congressional Democrats at that moment but was all but absent during this period of crisis. Pelosi snapped into action, correctly judging that more was at stake than Biden’s own personal career ambitions and reputation, and taking action to remedy the situation. She is, no doubt, a genuine leader in a party that has fewer of them every decade.

Then again, if her successors struggle to live up to the high standard she set, they can’t entirely be blamed. It’s not easy steering a ship that’s headed nowhere — and Pelosi bears significant responsibility for turning the Democrats into a directionless party of pro-corporate centrism.