Is this picture of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing in front of a huge, high-priced freezer, filled to the gills with a fortune in ice cream, an iconic Michael Dukakis moment?
Will it follow in the footsteps of the 1988 Democratic nominee’s tank photographic disaster, which defined its subject as too dim for words?
This isn’t just any old fridge or ice cream, but the creme-de-la-creme. The appliances, two large stainless-steel freezers, are filled to the brim with an extreme prestige brand name called Jeni’s, which is marketed largely over the internet and sells for a minimum of $12 a pint.
Pelosi’s choice would most likely be the “Emergency Chocolate Stash Collection,” a six-pack of various cocoa concoctions that will set you back $86 a throw. How many of these would it take to fill up two giant-sized freezers?
“We all have found our ways to keep our spirits up during these trying times,” she told the Late Late Show recently. “Mine just happens to fill up my freezer.”
When large parts of the workforce have had no pay for weeks, and people try to buy what they can in half-shuttered markets with empty shelves and slim pickings, such self-indulgence might not be a thing to flaunt.
But ice cream looms fairly large in Pelosi’s system of values. It makes an appearance in “Praying for Trump,” a piece on Pelosi by her friend Maureen Dowd that ran in Harper’s Bazaar last September. That was before the coronavirus had cast its spell on the country, but long enough into the first three years of the Trump administration to drive Pelosi and Dowd to despair.
It drove them into the chapel of Trinity College, her alma mater, to pray for his soul and the country. Pelosi said his soul was too sick to be saved, but one could still pray for his loss in November. Close to the chapel was the building’s kitchen that Pelosi and her friends would steal into at night to loot the school’s stash of her favorite sustenance.
“It was so dark on these ice cream raids that she could not always identify and grab her favorite, chocolate, which continues to be her main stress-buster,” Dowd told us. “She has been known to conduct interviews in her Capitol Hill office by dining on a Dove bar, which she eats daintily with a knife and fork.”
The Emperor of Ice Cream is the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens and of a novel by Brian Moore, which was named after it. Neither is about ice cream or emperors, but the title works very well for Pelosi, symbolizing the ways in which wealth and power tend to work pretty well for some kinds of people. We don’t know if Marie Antoinette really ate ice cream (the French queen probably did since Thomas Jefferson brought the recipe for it back to this country when he ended his term as ambassador to France in the late 1780s), but her spirit lives on in our current speaker.
“Nancy Pelosi remembers to stock her $24K refrigerators with $13 ice cream but forgot to restock the Paycheck Protection Program for our small businesses,” tweeted Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw last week. Touché.
“The rich are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once told Ernest Hemingway, who answered him back that they had more money. They also have more freezer space and the ice cream to fill it, evidently.
