Many leading Democrats pressed President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, and he finally ended his re-election campaign two weeks ago.
One of the people who was involved in that pressure campaign was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Over the weekend, she appeared on CBS Sunday Morning as part of a promotion for a new book she’s written called “The Art of Power.”
During the interview, the hosts asked her about what she told Biden as she was trying to persuade him to drop his re-election bid.
She smiled and then responded:
“Well, I’ve never shared any conversations with the President of the United States publicly, no.”
She added that she loves Biden “very much.”
She was then asked whether she was the leader of that pressure campaign. Pelosi responded:
“No, I wasn’t the leader of any pressure … let me say things I didn’t do: I didn’t call one person, I did not call one person. I could always say to him I never called anybody.
“What I’m saying is I had confidence that the president would make the proper choice for our country, whatever that would be, and I said that ‘whatever that is, we’ll go with.’”
Despite refusing to say what she did say to Biden, Pelosi had publicly called for the president to drop out of the race in the weeks before he made it official. That followed about a month of intense calls for Biden to drop after following his disastrous performance at the first presidential debate on June 27.
Despite those calls, Biden was insistent for a while that he was not stepping aside, as he was the right person to take down GOP nominee Donald Trump at the polls once again. Pelosi’s calls for him to step aside — as well as those from some other leading Democrats — seemed to contradict that, though.
Politico reported last month that Pelosi told some liberal lawmakers that she thought Biden could be persuaded to drop out of the race. The media outlet reported she even approached Biden and told him that he was dragging down the entire Democratic Party by remaining defiant.
That being said, she told CBS over the weekend that she hadn’t seen a decline in the performance or mental acuity of Biden, who is 81 years old, that he had to drop out of the race.
As she said:
“My whole point was whatever he decides, but we have to have a more aggressive campaign.”
Pelosi even propped up the leadership Biden showed at the NATO Summit in July, saying he was in a “good place” to make his decision. She continued:
“Such a consequential President of the United States. A Mount Rushmore kind of President of the United States.”
Pelosi then turned her attention to Trump, her long-time nemesis, when she called him the “best organizer and fundraiser for Democrats because people know he should never set foot again int he White House.”
