Some political figures know where the bodies are buried because they’ve been friends with the gravediggers for a long time. And some know where the bodies are buried because they buried them. Nancy Pelosi is the latter.
Pelosi has undeniably lost her edge in recent years, defanged and nudged aside rather pathetically by the Squad. But we got to see one last display of the politician she used to be, and she made it count: She, more than any other single figure, is responsible for Joe Biden getting rolled unceremoniously by his own party right out into the north portico of the White House.
Pelosi, you’ll remember, isn’t actually the Democrats’ House floor leader anymore. That’s Hakeem Jeffries, a talented New York pol who has proved surprisingly irrelevant. It turned out Pelosi was Putin to Jeffries’ Medvedev, although unlike the Russian duo Jeffries really will get his chance to govern once Pelosi is out of office.
Pelosi agreed to step down as House Democratic leader in the face of repeated protests by the Squad that party leadership was too old across the board. At the time, Democrats in elected leadership had an average age of approximately Methuselah. She’ll be damned if she’s going to keep quiet as Joe Biden asks the party to drag him over the finish line in what was shaping up to be an embarrassing loss to Donald Trump.
Her party got one last glimpse—or so it seemed—of Pelosi’s old self in 2018, when Marcia Fudge, a black Democrat from Ohio, declared she would challenge Pelosi for leadership. One Friday, a woman in Ohio was killed and her husband suspected of the crime. It turned out that the man had once before beaten the woman within an inch of her life, and Marcia Fudge wrote a letter on his behalf pleading for clemency. By the end of the weekend, that letter had “resurfaced.” By Tuesday, Fudge had decided to abandon her challenge to Pelosi, receiving in return only a face-saving chairmanship of a long-dormant subcommittee.
Since then, Pelosi had been a shadow of her former self. Until she was revivified by the call of duty: Someone needed to get the mad king off the throne on his own accord.
Why Pelosi was needed is another angle to this story. The Democrats are the minority party in the House but the majority party in the Senate. So why wouldn’t the party look to its Senate majority leader, in this case Chuck Schumer? The answer is that Schumer has found himself overmatched by the job.
Schumer’s predecessor was an old-school majority leader. The late Harry Reid was one of the most corrosive forces in American governance, tearing down congressional norms wherever he found them and breeding distrust throughout the institution. But because of that, he would also never hesitate to stab a man in the front, which is what Democrats were trying to do to Biden—after all, Biden didn’t have to step down. But Reid is gone, and in his chair sits Schumer—far from a naif, but someone whose sense of authority never left New York. We used to say that the most dangerous place in America was between Schumer and a camera, but that’s not the case anymore.
Barack Obama certainly played a role in getting Biden to drop out, but that role was almost surely a supporting one. As Biden would tell anyone who’d listen, he resented Obama for picking Hillary Clinton as his successor and ignoring his own vice president, good old loyal Joe. What’s more, Biden took his victory in 2020 as evidence that Obama’s political instincts weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Obama’s political instincts, Biden believed, were what gave the country Trump in 2016.
Moreover, Obama was out of elected office, so he had far less skin in the game. Pelosi, however, represented the party’s congressional contingent, which stood to lose a lot if Biden stayed in the race.
So it fell to Pelosi. Who, by the way, endorsed Harris today before Schumer and Jeffries delivered their own coordinated endorsement. Pelosi’s endorsement was treated as the crowning moment for Harris. Nobody seemed to be waiting to hear from Schumer and Jeffries.
One lesson of this whole affair is that as long as the 84-year-old Pelosi remains in Congress, Jeffries may obtain the speaker’s gavel but he won’t hold the gravedigger’s shovel. Schumer, meanwhile, has almost certainly missed his chance to get good at this job. And Pelosi doesn’t have the actual power to keep the Squad and others in line on every issue because she is not actually the party floor leader. Democrats are gradually getting their long-sought old guard to cede power to the next generation, but they are getting a hearty dose of chaos along with it.