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Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she was long dissatisfied with President Joe Biden’s campaign before he dropped out — not to mention his prospects for winning in November.
“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she told The New Yorker in an interview published Thursday. “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.”
In her interview, the 84-year-old former speaker signaled her personal frustration with the strength of Biden’s campaign operation, which she suggested was not up to the task of beating former President Donald Trump despite doing so successfully in 2020. And she reiterated her public stance that the president’s decision to get out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the ticket was Biden’s and Biden’s alone.
While Pelosi privately voiced concerns to Biden about the dire polling of June and July which suggested a widening battleground map, she has only just begun to publicly reflect on her view that the Biden campaign was not in a winning position. The San Francisco Democrat was still hesitant to admit playing a singular role in the push to bring Biden down.
“I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening,” Pelosi said after praising Biden’s accomplishments. “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.”
She cast her choices as a political legacy rescue mission for a president she deeply admired, citing his recent prisoner deal which was negotiated while he was facing a campaign crisis and which freed the journalist Evan Gershkovich, two other Americans, and multiple Russian political prisoners. And that rescue mission came even at the cost of their personal relationship, she added.
“I hope so. I pray so. I cry so,” Pelosi told The New Yorker when asked if she thought she could keep her friendship with Biden. “I lose sleep on it.”
