CORAL GABLES, Fla. _ The crowd outside campaign headquarters was boiling, the angry mood matching South Florida's tropical heat, as Nancy Pelosi arrived to a shower of obscenities and crude insults in English and Spanish.
With the doors locked and police standing guard, the Democratic congressional leader delivered her exhortation to dozens of volunteers _ Make those phone calls, walk those precincts, the future of America's at stake this midterm election! _ as crisp and unruffled as her white pantsuit.
Pelosi doesn't care about the invective hurled her way, in whatever language. She doesn't care that her face has appeared, menacing and twisted, in thousands of Republican attack ads. She doesn't care that life is a full-time residency in travel hell _ a blur of meals on the run, flight delays, a different hotel each night.
She cares about one thing, distilled in the advice Pelosi gives Democrats with any qualms about distancing themselves for political sake from the national party or its lightning-rod leader.
"Do whatever you have to do," she tells them. "Just win, baby."
No one, apart from President Donald Trump, may be more responsible if Democrats seize control of the House on Nov. 6, or fall short, than the 16-term representative from San Francisco, who has raised nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars since assuming her party's leadership in the chamber in 2003.
Now well into her eighth decade in politics _ as "Little Nancy" she helped track voters for her father, a New Deal congressman and former Baltimore mayor _ Pelosi is in many ways a perfect avatar for these deeply riven times.
She is a heroine, greeted with the kind of gushing adoration reserved for spiritual leaders and sports champions. She is a villain, cursed for obstructing the president's will and embodying the caricature of Democrats as a bunch of effete left-wing nut cases.
She is unshakable in her self-confidence _ "a master legislator and a dazzling fundraiser," Pelosi calls herself _ convinced that Republicans attack her only because she has been so very effective.
She also shoulders a sizeable chip over every slight she ascribes to gender or resentment over the power and prominence she enjoys in what remains, in many ways, a man's world. ("I don't think of them as anti-women," Pelosi said of NBC News, expressing puzzlement the network keeps a running tally questioning whether she has the votes to be elected speaker if Democrats win the House.)
She is tireless. During a two-day campaign swing a couple of weeks ago she was up at dawn and starred at a health care forum in Lawrence, Mass., a Harvard seminar, a meeting with gun control advocates, the get-out-the-vote rally in Coral Gables and a cocktail reception for South Florida Democrats. (Grazing, she snatched a slice of prosciutto before delivering her remarks to several dozen patrons before a high-rise view of the Atlantic.)
There were fundraisers for breakfast, lunch and dinner and, in between, a steady stream of phone calls and text messages with staffers, congressional colleagues and political donors.
On a good day, she makes it to bed around midnight, after rewarding herself with dark chocolate, a sudsy bath and the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Even as Pelosi signals an end point to her historic leadership run, she shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, she's traveling at a more frenzied pace _ 25 cities in the first 18 days of October _ all to thwart a chief executive she views as not only reckless and dangerous but, frankly, mind-boggling.
"Trump, president of the United States," she said, her voice dropping a register as if weighted by the words. "Oh, my God."
