Ascending to a national platform

The phone rang at 7:15 the morning after Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats swept into power. It woke her up.

“Do we have a baby?” Pelosi asked without pausing for hello. Her youngest daughter, Alexandra, was pregnant and six days overdue. Who else would call so early?

It was the president of the United States, holding.

“Leader Pelosi?” a confused switchboard operator asked, as President Bush waited to congratulate the woman who helped engineer the election-day “thumping” of his party.

As a member of the Democratic House leadership for five years, Pelosi has been an important Washington player. But this week, she awoke to a celebrity of a whole other order.

Her near-certain ascension as the nation’s first female speaker of the House had networks lining up for interviews and newspapers placing her picture on the front page. Blogs were abuzz.

Overnight, a woman who was scarcely known to the nation moved into a world of constant public attention. The morning after the election, she left her condo in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood without makeup on -- she likes to apply it in the car -- and walked into an ABC News stakeout.

Later last week, she lunched with Bush, shaking his hand at an Oval Office appearance where, in a postelection ritual familiar in Washington, the two leaders jointly vowed to end the partisan bickering. She met with Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Senate majority leader, to map out the agenda for the first 100 hours of the Congress that convenes in January.

A Washington power shift would have been big news by any measure, but Pelosi’s historic elevation handed her a larger megaphone to sound the themes her party hopes to build on. She began spelling out her agenda before the victory confetti was swept up: a new direction in Iraq, a higher federal minimum wage, lower prescription drug costs, more civility and improved ethics in Washington.

As the only daughter of late Maryland congressman and Baltimore Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro, Pelosi was nurtured in a political environment. There were always constituents in the living room, many of them looking for jobs or other help, their names kept in a “favor file” for consultation at election time.

Married and settled in San Francisco, she raised her five children in a similar atmosphere, enlisting them to stuff envelopes while she juggled laundry, meals and Democratic fundraising, ultimately as California party chairwoman and a major national fundraiser. Her efforts helped lure the party’s presidential convention to San Francisco in 1984 and helped Democrats regain control of the Senate two years later.

She was 47 -- her youngest child a senior in high school -- before she sought elected office, winning a seat in Congress from San Francisco. It was a late start in a Capitol filled with people who had lusted for political power since running for student-body president.

Now 66, Pelosi both embraces her status as the nation’s senior elected woman and bristles when pigeonholed as the first female this or that.

She demands to be regarded as a lawmaker who happens to be a woman, not the other way around.

Yet she never missed a chance to use gender to political advantage in the closing weeks of the bruising midterm campaign. “It will take a woman to clean up the House,” she told audiences time and again.

She likes to say that motherhood taught her to be organized, broker disputes and do a dozen things at once.

Family and colleagues speak of her inexhaustible energy, then and now. Pelosi’s daughter Christine, 40, doesn’t remember her mother sleeping much.

Pelosi does not exercise regularly and is a confessed chocoholic; there are bowls of it in her office. (The White House tactically served Chocolate Freedom, a souffle, for Thursday’s luncheon dessert.)

In two months of campaigning, Pelosi made 37 visits to 18 states and raised millions for more than 70 candidates.

Even during the most hectic days, she balanced work with family. A stop in Arizona meant a visit with two of her five grandchildren in Phoenix. The same in Texas, where the other three live. She carries two cellphones, one for business and one for family members, who try not to call frivolously because, no matter what, she always answers.

The downside of that energy and organization is a tendency to micromanage, which sometimes stymies her staff and frustrates allies. She tinkers with stagecraft at news conferences, fussing over backdrops and the like.

She can be gracious and ruthless. She threw an ice cream social for Rep. Jane Harman when the Venice Democrat returned to Congress after a failed 1998 bid for governor. But more recently, Pelosi signaled she would pass over Harman for leadership of the House Intelligence Committee for allegedly being too conciliatory to Republicans.

Well known for harboring grudges, Pelosi makes no apologies. “I have a reptilian approach,” she once said, describing how she determined which candidates were deserving of support. “You have to be very cold-blooded in how you allocate resources.”

Tuesday’s election bore out Pelosi’s velvet-hammer approach. She whipped together Democrats and achieved a level of party unity that had not been seen in decades, all the while traveling virtually nonstop to raise record sums of money.

After lunch at the White House last week, Pelosi sat with Bush in the Oval Office for a brief media blitz. Cameras fired. The bitter rivals shook hands.

“There’s a natural phenomenon to be pitted against the president,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “But the speakership of the House is not the presidency. She can’t make decisions like the president. She leads a collective body. And the more it gets framed in personal terms, the more dangerous and difficult it’s going to be.”

Pelosi has to show she can unify the famously fractious Democrats in her charge, help lay the foundation for the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, and give colleagues a record to tout when they fight to preserve their majority in the next election.

Only then, if she wins a second term as speaker, will Pelosi prove as successful in the House as she was in the home.

faye.fiore@latimes.com

mark.barabak@latimes.com