Nancy Pelosi's remarkable career was impossible to predict

The mystery of being a political consultant is that you never know how your winning candidate’s career will turn out. On Election Night in 1987, when Nancy Pelosi was elected to Congress for her first term, I had no idea that she would someday become speaker of the House of Representatives and the most powerful female politician in the nation.

At the time, I was also then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s political consultant . Dianne’s career was ascendant. She was only three years past a close runner-up bid to become Walter Mondale’s vice-presidential nominee in 1984 and five years from a future as California’s powerful U.S. senator in 1992. But Nancy was soon to join Dianne in the political pantheon.

In the months prior to Nancy’s election, I wasn’t thinking about history. I was scrambling t