Nancy Pelosi has announced her retirement after decades as a shrewd political operator. A genuine leader in a party that lacks them, Pelosi bears a large share of the blame for the Democrats’ embrace of bland corporate centrism.

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

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