Master of the House

Nancy Pelosi is the most important legislative leader of the last half century, and her most important action may prove to be one she took while she was formally a backbencher:

Sure. Pelosi went on to say that she had been “startled” by Biden’s performance in the June 27th debate with Donald Trump, that she had “never” seen him in such an alarming and confused state. “In fact, earlier in the day, when I was with the members, they were, like, Oh, how’s it going to be? ‘Trump will be so awful,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about it. The Joe Biden of the State of the Union is going to show up. It’s going to be great.’ In fact, I didn’t even want him to be in a debate. . . . I said, [Trump’s] doggy doo-doo. You’re going to get doggy doo-doo on your shoe. It’s not a good thing. You can’t. We’re just talking shorthand here, right? You can’t do that. But [Biden] was going to do it. He felt great. And I had confidence in him. I didn’t think it wouldn’t be good. I just didn’t want him to be seen with that guy. And then that happened, and I think everybody was stunned. It was stunning.”

And so, on “Morning Joe,” when asked, inevitably, about Biden’s prickly reluctance to give up the race, Pelosi responded as if the President had not said, over and over, that he had no intention of giving in to the calls for him to step aside. “It’s up to the President to decide if he’s going to run,” she said evenly for the cameras. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short. . . . He’s beloved, he’s respected, and people want him to make that decision.” And then, to make sure her audience of one got the message, she added, “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides, we go with.”

Pelosi did not deny the craft or the intent of what she had done. Countless members of the commentariat and more than a few politicians had already pressed Biden to call off his campaign, but, after Pelosi’s breakfast-time performance, something began to give way, perhaps even in the Biden household. Pelosi’s message delivery was arguably as essential to Biden’s decision to stand aside as the moment at the conclusion of the Watergate scandal when, on August 7, 1974, the Republican congressional heavies Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes, and Hugh Scott went to the White House to make it plain to Richard Nixon that he had lost all support on the Hill. On August 8th, Nixon announced that he would resign.

Without quite admitting to playing a singularly decisive role in the Biden drama—and it would be uncharacteristically vain to do so—Pelosi told me, “Here’s the thing: I’ve known Joe Biden for over forty years, since I was chair of the California Democratic Party, and I love him so much. I think he’s been, really, a fantastic President of the United States. I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening. . . . We couldn’t see it go down the drain, because Trump was going to be President and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw.”

When I pressed Pelosi to talk in greater detail about her language on “Morning Joe,” she looked at me silently, unblinking. Finally, as the silence expanded past the boundary of awkward, I said, “You’re looking at me and waiting for this moment to pass.”

“Yeah, but I’m trying to think of why you’re even asking it, because, you know, I’m not going to answer it the way that you want,” Pelosi said. “I didn’t plan to do that on [‘Morning Joe.’] In fact, if I did, I probably would’ve worn a different suit or something, because I didn’t look too professional.”

“It was like you felt his pain,” I said.

Then Pelosi dropped her calculated reserve. “I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen. People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines, I was talking to Chuck [Schumer]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all.

“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.” Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

The comments about Biden’s political team are telling. Biden’s disastrous debate performance wasn’t just a huge problem in itself — it was his campaign’s strategy for turning the race around, and it both put him further behind Trump and made it clear that he did not have a viable strategy for coming from behind because he couldn’t run anything like a normal campaign — but it’s pretty clear that elite Democrats took the unusual step to urge Biden to stand down because his decision to run betrayed the trust of the party and also made it evident that he was getting bad advice from his inner circle.

And even more telling is “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.” Prominent Democrats were generally saying that beating Trump was existentially important, but too many people weren’t really acting like it during a period of crisis. We should be grateful that Pelosi didn’t give in to the fatalist wave, knew what needed to be done, and played a huge role in getting it done. A capstone achievement to an amazing career.