Pelosi’s Pizza Problem
Roll Call Staff
A lively debate on immigration during the dog days of August nearly turned into a sort-of food fight as a staffer for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tried to launch a bizarre protest by walking off with a pizza.
Federico DeJesus, who handles Hispanic media outreach for Pelosi, was infuriated by Victor Davis Hanson’s presentation at the Aug. 19 event, sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Hanson, author of the book “Mexifornia: A State of Becoming,” is an outspoken advocate of stopping the flood of illegal immigration from Mexico to California.
At the end of the speech in the Longworth House Office Building, DeJesus stood up to deliver the first question from the audience and launched into a long rant accusing Hanson of penning a “racist” book.
The controversy was compounded by the fact that Hanson had earlier noted he is a “classicist,” as in a classics professor at California State University at Fresno.
“You yourself admitted that you’re a ‘classist,’” DeJesus shouted, apparently believing that the professor had confessed to being an elitist or some such taboo.
“I thought Pelosi would have had more sensible staff,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the CIS, told HOH. “Some basic democratic civility would have been appropriate. There were some other Democratic staff there, and I think they were embarrassed.”
Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly told HOH that DeJesus was merely trying to correct the record with regard to some statements the professor had made about a prominent Hispanic group.
“He felt the speaker was making some comments about La Raza that were inaccurate, and he wanted to correct them,” said Daly, in reference to the National Council for La Raza, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving life for Hispanic Americans.
Daly allowed that the discussion did grow heated, but only because some people in attendance repeatedly referred to DeJesus as “Mr. Sosa,” as in Hispanic baseball star Sammy Sosa, during his question.
“He felt that they were intentionally getting his name wrong, and he was offended by that,” Daly said.
The fight reached its climax when DeJesus stormed away from his seat and decided to grab one of the many boxes of pizza in the back of the room on his way out the door.
“He tried to steal one of our pizzas,” charged Krikorian. “One of my guys had to get it back. He yelled, ‘I hope you enjoy the pizza!’ He was basically a heckler.”
DeJesus claimed that he merely wanted to take some food back to his office and meant no disrespect, but Krikorian wasn’t buying that.
“This was sort of sophomoric,” said Krikorian. “Something you’d expect at some radicalized university campus, not Capitol Hill.”
Minority Leader Gets the Boot. As if that wasn’t enough excitement for one recess, Pelosi got a surprise from the District of Columbia last Tuesday when the city booted her 1999 Cadillac for unpaid parking tickets.
The car, which her daughter Christine drives, had “several hundred dollars” worth of outstanding tickets when it was parked at the corner of Third and East Capitol streets, according to Daly. The boot was gone within a few hours of its placement on the vehicle that morning, he added, noting that Christine Pelosi paid the fees in cash immediately.
Pelosi rides with a security detail and rarely drives that car herself.
According to the D.C. government Web site, a boot is administered when a vehicle holds two or more 30-day-old parking tickets. It costs $50 to remove the boot, plus the cost of the unpaid tickets.
“The boot is now gone,” Daly said. “She has moved the car.”
Daly said the tickets dated back to 1997 and 1998, before Pelosi purchased the Cadillac. For some reason, he said, the tickets carried over onto the newer vehicle.
Language Barriers. White House aides and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) have both been having a hard time with linguistic issues lately.
White House spokesman Taylor Gross revealed to the Houston Chronicle in August that the Bush administration has found a new way to reach out to Hispanic voters: Hire more press secretaries who speak Spanish — although that’s not exactly how the staffer put it.
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