Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday said Democrats need to hold the White House and win majorities in both the House and Senate to defend democracy against Republicans led by former President Donald Trump, a belief that underscored her concerns about President Joe Biden’s reelection bid.
While reiterating she thinks Biden is a “very, very consequential president,” she hinted many of his accomplishments were in jeopardy if he continued his presidential bid against Trump.
“I wanted very much to protect his legacy … and what it meant to the American people,” Pelosi said at an appearance at the University Club of Chicago, noting that legacy ranged from getting a massive infrastructure program passed to cutting the costs of prescription drugs.
Pelosi rebuffed efforts to explain more about her interactions with Biden that precipitated the president’s decision to withdraw from the campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
Pressed for more details during an invitation-only discussion with Democratic political strategist and CNN commentator David Axelrod, Pelosi declined to offer many. Axelrod joked at one point Pelosi was “filibustering” rather than telling the entire story of her conversations with Biden.
“My point was only, ‘We need a better campaign,’” she said during the interview promoting her new book, “The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House.” While stating she knows policy, she said, “I know my politics too. So I want to see certain things, those things. The president made his decision.”
She quickly added, “He made a decision to pass the torch with great selflessness.”
Pelosi was one of the most high-profile Democrats to signal publicly that Biden should step aside from the campaign trail following his halting June 27 debate performance against Trump that reignited questions about the 81-year-old president’s viability. Biden withdrew from the race less than a month later and backed Harris, who is set to celebrate her nomination in Chicago on Thursday at the Democratic National Convention.
“I have very serious concerns about the preceding president,” Pelosi said, refusing to mention Trump by name. “It was essential for our country, for our democracy, for us to be able to win this election.”
Asked to go beyond the politics and discuss what it meant to have those difficult conversations with Biden, Pelosi said: “We won’t be having that conversation right now. What we’re doing now is to say, ‘Great sacrifice was made here. … Right now it is about winning the election.”
She acknowledged she “cried over this, I’m sad about it, but we take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That’s who we are. We take a pledge to the flag every day, liberty and justice for all. That’s who we are.”
Instead of talking about “who said what when, where and how on how we got to this decision,” Pelosi said Biden’s decision “increases the odds that we can protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Speaker off and on for eight years beginning in 2007, Pelosi held the Democratic leadership role during key moments in the nation’s history, from the passage of Obamacare to the Jan. 6, 2021, Trump-inspired insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
She likened the importance of winning in November to the “Star Spangled Banner” words made famous by Francis Scott Key, who wrote how he saw “proof through the night” that the American “flag was still there” after British bombardments during the War of 1812.
“And this is part of the night that we have to ‘proof through,’” she said, drawing applause.
Pelosi maintained winning the House and making Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York speaker is critical to the nation’s future and lamented how Republicans too often today only accept the results of an election when they win.
“Where’d that come from? What’s that?” she said, adding, “You have to make … a decision to win and you have to make every decision in favor of winning.”
“You have to not waste any time. You cannot underutilize any resource, and you cannot have one regret the day of the election that you could have done (something differently),” she said.