A former Biden White House official has torn into Nancy Pelosi, blaming her for pushing the president off the 2024 campaign.
Symone Sanders Townsend, now a commentator for MSNBC, criticised the veteran Democrat as the party continues to pore over the reasons behind Kamala Harris’ devastating loss to Donald Trump.
“Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the speaker emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the speaker in Congress, but my question is: Where is your calculator now?” Sanders Townsend told panelists during an episode of “The Weekend.”
“She played in presidential politics this cycle, and she helped orchestrate the very public demise of the president,” she added in the comments on Saturday.
The Independent has contacted Pelosi for comment
The comments came in response to recent remarks from Pelosi about Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race and endorse Kamala Harris.
Pelosi told a New York Times podcast on Saturday that there was an expectation Biden would drop out sooner, opening the way for a more competitive process to choose his replacement that might’ve sharpened the Democrats’ response to Trump.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi said. “And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time.
Biden announced his withdrawal from the campaign and endorsed Harris in July, following a growing chorus of Democrats who felt he wasn’t fit to take on Trump after a disastrous debate performance and mounting concerns about his age.
Behind the scenes, Pelosi was reportedly telling fellow Democrats and donors she interacted with to “speak their conscience” if they had concerns about Biden.
A House Democrat told NBC News at the time that a recent wave of party members speaking out against Biden’s campaign was “all Nancy’s doing.”
Publicly, meanwhile, Pelosi was more measured, seeming to suggest Biden should drop out without actually saying the words.
“It’s up to the president to [decide] if he’s going to run,” she told an interviewer in July, even as Biden was already running. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short,” she said.
In the wake of their loss to Trump, the Democrats have engaged in a round of public debate and recrimination over who’s responsible.
Pelosi was involved in another notable intra-party fight, criticizing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for his take that the Democrats hadn’t done enough to appeal to working-class voters.
