Lady McBiden, Pelosi First of Her Name, and the Struggles of American Royalty

Speaker Emeritas Nancy of House Pelosi, First of Her Name

For a nation born of the notion that people are better off without the yoke of monarchy, we do seem to love our own royalty, don’t we? Or is that they can’t help but remind us of their supposed importance. After all, would an antisemitic madman with an alleged taste for Canis lupus familiaris have a seat at any “respectable” – I have to couch the term carefully, given what has become of it – political table without his storied initials? The man who gave us the headline “RFK Jr. Denies Eating Dog but Not Assaulting Nanny”?

What brings all this to mind is not RFK, Jr., but rather an unintentionally revealing column by Jonathan Martin published in Politico January 19. Long story short – as he intends to tell it – is that First Lady Jill Biden is not being nice to Representative Nancy Pelosi after the latter broke a hip in a fall in Europe last month.

The real story is that there is a power play over who gets to shape legacies. Did Nancy nuke Joe’s when she pushed him out of the presidential race? Or is Jill trying to sully Nancy’s by not playing along with a false show of unity?

History always favors the winners, after all.

Why does this matter, really? When you view this from the perspective that we are not looking at powerful individuals but rather noble houses, stakes become clearer. The story is not sourced to Representative Pelosi herself; I will not dignify her with the title a committee of her party gave her that her court bard, Jonathan Martin uses, the laughable “Speaker Emerita.” (The nobles and their love of titles, right?) Rather, the story comes from her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi.

“If I was Lady McBiden, I’d put on my big girl pants, play the long game and think about my husband’s legacy,” Martin quotes her.

We’ll get to what substance there may be to that, but a moment on how the quote is presented: both here and in his headline, Martin fails to put the appropriate (sic) after the misspelled reference to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. There are three possibilities here, and none of them look good for Martin. The first possibility is that he mis-transcribed her spoken quote and didn’t pay enough attention to correct the error. Second, it could be that he received the quote in a text or email and both he and Ms. Peolsi are insufficiently familiar with Shakespeare’s play. Third is that he recognized the error but didn’t want to make her look bad. (There’s a fourth possibility, but it posits the continued existence of something called a copy editor, which is akin to suggesting the continued existence of velociraptors.)

To return to the quote itself: What, the reader is left to ask, would constitute the evil, scheming Lady McBiden (sic) “putting on her big girl pants, play[ing] the long game and think[ing] about [her] husband’s legacy”? What bold stroke could Jill employ that would turn the eye of history in President Biden’s favor as he steps from public life?

It is clear from the context that it is this: She should say something nice about the ailing former speaker. Apparently being hosted by Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg isn’t enough for her. And what’s in it for Dr. Jill? “There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.”

If this isn’t the sort of petty behavior we expect from entitled nobility, I don’t know what is.

And I cannot stress the word entitled enough.

Let this sink in:

“Desperate to get her the best possible care in the initial hours after the accident, the Pelosis grappled with whether she should go to a U.S. military hospital, which she did, or immediately fly back home for care. And part of that trepidation, I’m told, owed to uncertainty about whether Biden would quickly get her a plane.”

Speaker Emerita Nancy of House Pelosi, First of Her Name, who could easily afford a plane flight back to the States, had to slum it at a military hospital because they weren’t sure if King Joe would send a plane. How mean! All of which is made all the more laughable in the next sentence: “(Another source said any concerns abated when White House staff heard the news and were swiftly responsive.)”

You can’t make this up.

Don’t worry, there’s even more pettiness: Not only is Jill giving them the silent treatment, so is Joe. Well, not exactly. Here the Bard, accompanied by harp and lute and flute sang:

“The Pelosi family had not planned on entering the party’s receiving line. When they walked to the front, though, they were warmly greeted by the president, vice president and first gentleman. But Jill Biden was missing.”

The petty here is layered like a slice of social lasagna.

First is the indignity of having to go through the receiving line at the President of the United States’ holiday party like some piddling Baronet or Marquess, but then when you get to the front Jill is not there.

Jill. Is. Not. There.

And you take that personally.

Now, no one is alleging that Jill shook hands with everyone else but then quickly secreted herself into a closet like a cartoon character – complete with sound effects and likes following here to show how fast she was going – when Nancy got there, as much as I enjoy the visual. No, she must have missed all or at least some large portion of the guests. Were they similarly offended?

And doesn’t Queen Jill have a right to view the woman who orchestrated a behind-the-scenes coup against her husband with some disdain?

This is the state of American Nobility.

Democrats are not alone in their tacit support for hereditary social nobility – Houses Bush, Romney and Goodell are noteworthy – and smaller polities have their own – New York’s House Cuomo and New Hampshire’s House Sununu come to mind. There is some truth, I think, to the idea that, while undemocratic, a person growing up around the machinations of power may be more likely to know how to effectively use it and to have the connections to get. I think that goes poorly more often than not, but I will allow that there are times when the incentives of the nobility and the good of the many are aligned.

So, what can be done about this? There are a number of big picture things which could be done: term limits are one. A hard end to insider trading among Congress Critters is another. On a smaller scale, we could use the word former in front of titles more often or even – gasp! – not use them at all once a person has left office.

The best thing we could do is not take these people as seriously. Inflated sense of importance is rife among our social, political and economic so-called betters and the press is happy to play along. But there’s nothing saying that we have to treat our grasping, petty, insufferable nobility as anything other than what they are: occasionally respectable in rare examples; laughably contemptible as a class.