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What needed to be done

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Joe Biden, who was close to Nancy Pelosi for decades, has apparently stopped speaking to her since she started insisting that Democrats needed a presidential candidate who wasn’t running 10 to 15 points behind every battleground state Democratic Senate candidate with no viable plan to turn things around:

Over the next five decades, the two old-school Catholic Democrats who grew up in the era of Elvis Presley and were inspired by the election of the country’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, cultivated a natural friendship.

They discovered that they both carried rosaries in their pockets. They learned how to wield power in Washington as leaders of top-tier congressional committees: the House Intelligence and Appropriations Committees for her, the Senate Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees for him.

In May, at the twilights of their long careers, Mr. Biden, 81, awarded Ms. Pelosi, 84, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, anointing her the “greatest speaker of the House of Representatives in history.”

That was then. In July, Ms. Pelosi began pushing for Mr. Biden to exit the presidential race, and the two have not spoken since he made the difficult decision to step aside. There are multiple reports that Mr. Biden is angry with her. (On Wednesday, a person close to him said he was “unhappy” with the way things went.)

Ms. Pelosi has been making the rounds on a book tour, which has given her the opportunity to disparage Mr. Biden’s political team for failing, she has said, to put in place a winning presidential campaign.

It has made for an uncomfortable split screen. Ms. Pelosi, who in 2022 made the decision to step down and allow a new generation of leaders in the House to rise, is basking in her power. (“The Art of Power” is the title of her book.) Mr. Biden has all but disappeared from the stage, in part because of the role she played in stripping him of his.

It is not clear when they will speak again, a painful reality that Ms. Pelosi admits keeps her up at night. “I hope so, I pray so, I cry so. I lose sleep on it,” she told David Remnick, the editor in chief of The New Yorker, earlier this month, when pressed on whether her relationship with Mr. Biden would survive.

The remarkable turnaround in the polls over the last month will make replacing Biden with Harris seem inevitable in retrospect should Harris go on to win. But it was always a highly contingent process. The choices Pelosi and other Democrats with a relationship with Biden were not easy choices on a personal level or on a political level (because ultimately it was Biden’s choice so it was never certain urging him to leave the race would work.) The path of least resistance was always there; a politician made of different stuff than Pelosi may well have taken it.

Democrats have sometimes been criticized for saying that keeping Trump out of the White House was a matter of existential importance but not really acting like it. There was a real risk that these criticisms could have been proven valid. The fact that Pelosi and other elite Democrats really believed it and acted accordingly even if it meant personally uncomfortable choices is something they deserve a lot of credit for. As, of course, does Biden for ultimately doing the difficult but right thing.

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