NEW YORK _ The stories Ilyse Hogue tells are not the kind you hear from other bosses in the Democratic Party.
Like the time she was a Greenpeace activist and lived on a bus. Or when, as a leader at MoveOn.org, she realized she knew more about the Obama health plan than the lawmakers she was pressuring.
Or the moment she cried as she prepared to take the stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention and tell the world she had had an abortion.
Sitting in a midtown Manhattan coffee house, a dozen devoted fans leaning close over a table littered with muffin crumbs, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America recounted how she was getting ready to deliver her groundbreaking speech when the tears began. It wasn't due to nerves.
"I had this moment of extraordinary panic that I had chosen to wear a red dress," Hogue said. "And I'm like, 'It's like a giant scarlet letter!'"
Everyone at the table laughed. But Hogue was making a serious point. She believes people who are reticent about abortion, most of all Democratic leaders, are letting their opponents win.
That is, in fact, what most of her stories are about. They are tales she uses to demonstrate a firmly held belief that the Democratic Party is doing it wrong.
"In some ways, we're the biggest obstacle in our own pathway to success," Hogue told her coffee-house crowd, summing up an argument she's made in countless op-eds and interviews. "By buying into abortion stigma, by not talking about it, by not grounding it in common values, by not having the conversation that needs to be had, we're letting them off the hook."
For the 48-year-old, this point of view comes naturally. She has spent a lifetime in liberal activism, taking on radical projects that might seem far-fetched to some but are at the heart of her mission to change how the nation functions.
To the Democratic leaders who have faced her wrath, these issues aren't so easy. But more than ever before, they are being forced to listen. A party reeling from last year's electoral catastrophe has been transformed by a surge of energy from the activist left, electrified by Donald Trump's inauguration and embodied by the million-person Women's March the day after he entered the White House.
That movement has guaranteed Hogue a level of influence previously denied to liberal activists. And it has imbued her with a power she eagerly taps, clashing with Democratic leaders who have frequently and for decades backed down under her pressure.
"You couldn't assume before that a Democratic Party leader had really been at the barricades before being in the halls of power," said Anna Galland, an old colleague of Hogue's and a current top official at MoveOn.org. "Ilyse spent her life building power within social movements, and she has brought those movements with her into the halls of power."
To the women at this informal NARAL meeting in New York, Hogue's ascendance is an unalloyed good. They thanked her profusely for coming to speak with them, one admitting to being a "fangirl."
Other Democratic leaders, especially those trying to win races in red states, aren't so sure.
