WASHINGTON — 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.
