Sometimes when Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey got up to speak I would hold my breath. She’s not a smooth talker, sometimes speaking haltingly like she’s trying to gather her thoughts. But as tentative as she could be in her delivery, she was always strong in her convictions.

Still, I’m happy about Lynn announcing this week that she will not run for an 11th term in the House of Representatives. For one reason. She can cut back on the speech-making and the mocking of her fumbles by media critics. One of her supporters standing next to me when Lynn made her announcement said, “Can you imagine taking on a job where half of it required you to do something you hated doing and knew you weren’t very good at?”

That was about the time the coastal California wind swept through Lynn’s Petaluma backyard, tangled her speech notes, she lost track of what she was about to say, then shrugged and said, “Well, you know.”

Smooth talking is definitely an asset in politics but it isn’t everything. Washington is full of silver tongued slicks in a suit. Dick Cheney is good with words. Anthony Weiner was a definite wit.

Actually Lynn does quite ably in one-on-one talks. Rachel Maddow closed one interview with Lynn, saying, “always a pleasure to hear your straight talk, Ma’m.”

Yes, straight talk. Not flowery. Not clever. Not mean. No winky-winks.

And always a brave heart. In doing exactly what her constituents wanted. Never wavering.

Lynn has opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and American involvement in Libya. She’s delivered nearly 400 speeches on the House floor in support of bringing U.S. troops home. She voted against the USA Patriot Act, saying that it recklessly violated civil liberties. She once proposed the government establish a Department of Peace with cabinet status. In 2006, she gave antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan a ticket to George Bush’s State of the Union speech.

She initially voted against the $700 billion financial bailout because she said it wouldn’t do enough to provide jobs. She pushed for a stronger public health care option than was eventually adopted in the Affordable Care Act and waited quietly while rowdies at a town hall meeting in Petaluma shouted her down when she said, “our health care system is broken.”

Nancy Pelosi has called her the “conscience of the Congress.”

Lynn went to Washington when she was 55 in 1992, the famous Year of the Women when a record number of women joined the House and Senate. It was not lost on those who gathered in Lynn’s back yard that coincidentally the same day she announced she would be leaving Congress another congresswoman, from Minnesota, announced her bid for president, even though about the only things the two have in common is their gender and their job title.

For example, Lynn Woolsey fought against privatizing Social Security when George W. proposed it. Now Lynn is re-engaged in the current Republican assault on Social Security. The Minnesota Congresswoman has bragged that were her GOP crowd in control they could get rid of Social Security over one long weekend.

Lynn’s good pal and colleague Congresswoman Barbara Lee credits Lynn for never being shy about connecting her personal experiences to her political beliefs. Lynn is the first member of Congress to have once been a single mother on welfare, so of course she supports social safety nets. When you ask her about choice she tells the story about her grandmother, pregnant with her first child and almost to term when something went wrong and the doctor told her husband there was no way to save both his wife and the baby. And he chose his wife. And two years later Lynn’s mother was born.

Lynn, who has promised to continue her anti-war efforts and work to protect the California coast from offshore oil drilling, is the real thing. Nancy Pelosi has called her the “conscience of the Congress.”

That’s certainly worth more than glib talk from suits in wingtips.

“The Great Man,” a novel by Kate Christensen, focuses on the life and death of a male artist who seemingly had it all and the three devoted but not altogether adoring women he leaves behind – his sister, his mistress and his wife.
These are women, now in their very senior years, who might have once been known as the women behind the men. The type of women who might have also been described … and dismissed…as “once brilliant” and “once passionate,” assuming that after a certain age, such qualities can only be a memory.
Not Christensen’s women in this 2007 novel. The male hero is fascinating enough as important eccentric New York artists go, but the women are even moreso – complicated, opinionated, difficult, lusty and boldly sexual.
The story is about unlikely friendships and late loves, one of those books that I like because the women defy the gray, regretful stereotype of older women. These are women we might all hope to be. Or grow into.
Consider the one who observes her former colleague and new lover. “He had piercing blue eyes that were now examining her with frank rapaciousness.”
And another who muses to a young friend: “Younger people always think they know what older people don’t know.”
Very New York, very arty.
Try it. And tell me what you’ve been reading that shows us like we are.