Since breaking her hip in Europe last month, Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi has been flooded with messages, flowers and concerned calls from heads of state, colleagues from both parties and even members of the royal family, most notably Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg, He received her on her assumption of office.
Most notably, however, she heard nothing, which angered Pelosi’s friends and family: Joe and Jill Biden.
That anger has been fueled by the fact that Jill Biden continues to hold a grudge against Pelosi for pushing the president to drop out of last year’s campaign.
“If I were Mrs. McBride, I would put on my plus-size pants and think long term about my husband’s legacy,” Alexandra Pelosi, the former speaker’s daughter, told me on Saturday. “There are not many people in the United States who have good things to say about Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.” Pelosi made it clear that she was only speaking for herself.
The deafening silence from the White House in response to requests for comment marked the culmination of a bitter feud between the president and the former speaker, two of the most prominent Democrats of our generation, who marked the culmination of the party’s Obama era and Trump restoration. The bookends of the trough.
Since Pelosi helped orchestrate a congressional coup against Biden last summer, the president has refused to speak to her in any significant way, effectively ending his relationship with the pre-baby boomer who he once called ” My Catholic Sisters”.
Biden has claimed in recent weeks that he could have defeated Trump. Even more surprising was the president’s admission that he wasn’t sure he could serve out a second term, a promise he made when he sought re-election at age 82.
However, when the history of this period is written, I have no doubt that Pelosi’s intervention will be viewed as crucial to her party. If she and other leading Democrats don’t insist that Biden withdraw from the race, Republicans will use his poor debate performance to capture more congressional seats and do even more damage to Biden’s legacy.
I’ve yet to find anyone in either party outside of Biden’s last supporters who think otherwise.
As far as I know, Pelosi has tried to talk to Biden multiple times. But she and the intermediaries who also tried to reconcile got the same response over and over again from the president’s senior advisers: The answer is no.
“She was told they weren’t done with it and not to make any more offers because he was blaming her,” said one person who has spoken to Pelosi about conversations between the former speaker and Biden aides. .
Pelosi told PEOPLE last week that she was shocked that the Biden family would leave so quietly, asking them why they were expressing such painful emotions.
A Biden spokesman declined to speak publicly but did not deny the silence.
Steve Ricchetti, the Biden aide Pelosi knows best, did not respond to text messages.
Biden did speak briefly with Pelosi, her husband Paul and daughter Kristen at a White House holiday party last month. But that encounter only reminded them of their break.
The Pelosi family had no intention of entering the party’s receiving line. However, when they came to the front, they were greeted warmly by the President, Vice President and First Gentleman. But Jill Biden is missing.
Any possibility the Pelosi family thought the first lady’s absence that night was a coincidence was erased last week when Jill Biden publicly expressed her anger at the former speaker in an interview with The Washington Post .
“We are friends 50 years,” the first lady said. “It’s disappointing.”
To the dismay of her close friends, Biden appeared to blame Pelosi alone for her mediation, which most Democratic leaders then and now said was necessary. After all, Pelosi, as speaker, voted for Biden’s most important accomplishments, first as vice president and then as president.
When I asked a longtime Biden adviser this week why he was so angry at Pelosi and not Barack Obama, the adviser said the president took it personally because they were related , and he recognized early on that his relationship with Obama was terrible.
It’s also common for family members of public officials to be more likely to hold grudges personally and to hold them longer. But after Pelosi slipped up in Luxembourg, the political and the personal merged.
Desperate to get her the best care in the first hours after the accident, the Pelosis struggled with whether she should go to a U.S. military hospital (which she did) or fly home immediately for treatment. Part of the fear is whether Biden will soon arrange a plane for her “because we have this wall in the White House,” according to a person familiar with the matter. (Another source said any concerns were alleviated when White House staff heard the news and responded quickly.)
There’s another incident that has never been reported that also makes Pelosi’s friends and family angry about Biden’s treatment: how she privately urged the president to withdraw.
On July 10 last year, less than two weeks before the now-infamous debate, Pelosi slipped into the White House residence early in the morning. Pelosi, who initially spoke to Biden alone, expressed her concerns about polls showing his support plummeting, while the president pushed back, insisting he could still win.
But Pelosi’s allies say the key is that her initial efforts to persuade Biden were delivered with dignity, not daggers.
“There was no threat,” one source told me. “She just told him the truth – that he was losing in every poll and people had lost confidence.”
this is not for understatement Pelosi’s role in pushing Biden to withdraw from the race. She was the most crucial character in last summer’s behind-the-scenes political drama.
If it weren’t for Pelosi’s “Morning Joe” interview before her meeting with Biden at the White House residence, it’s entirely possible that the president would have weathered the crisis.
When Congress returned the week of July 4, when many Democratic lawmakers turned back to Biden and the president emphasized his desire to stay in office, the former speaker repeatedly insisted that his decision remained an open question. This pivotal moment effectively ensured that – less than two weeks later, Biden was withdrawing.
The frost between the two men has since saddened their old friends and left even some of the most promising politicians speechless, at least in terms of public consumption, and a series of brief conversations last week left me Remembered this.
“I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that things can change over time,” said former Sen. Christopher Dodd, who hopes the loophole can be fixed. Dodd received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Biden this month and had given the Image of Courage Award to Pelosi, a close friend of his late sister, but declined to say more. But he told people he hopes to help reunite his former colleagues once Biden is out of office.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., is one of Pelosi’s most loyal legislative allies, and Biden believes she left her son Hunter behind while he was attending Yale Law School. With Newhay under Vin’s protection, she was as restrained as Dodd.
“Time has a way of solving things,” DeLauro told me, acknowledging that both Pelosi and Biden are “very strong people.”
However, people familiar with Biden wonder whether he can truly reconcile with Pelosi.
“I don’t think he’ll ever get over this,” said Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.).
Biden and Pelosi became friends when the future speaker was a volunteer fundraiser raising five children and the future president was a 30-something senator with lofty ambitions but resources Rarely, he borrowed her car when he visited San Francisco.
Although their families were not close — Jill Biden’s condolences were in part confusing to Pelosi’s family — the two Democrats shared similar Silent Generation sensibilities about politics, faith and public conduct. Both are politically liberal but personally conservative Cold War Catholics who were raised in the church and remain regular mass communicators.
They were also institutionalists through and through, committed to working within the system, uncomfortable with the politics and tactics of young progressives, and appalled by nearly every inch of the once and future president.
Everyone has more talent for retail than wholesale politics, and everyone knows the value of grace notes and humanity.
That’s why Pelosi was so grateful for Biden’s kindness when her husband was nearly murdered in 2022, calling her immediately after hearing news of the late-night attack on Pelosi’s home.
“His comments about Paul were so pious, kind and thoughtful,” she wrote in her book “The Art of Power,” published last year.
He hasn’t experienced anything like this since Pelosi’s accident.
