It seemed to be a point of pride for Nancy Pelosi that hers was one of the voices that knocked Presidentish Joe Biden out of his reelection campaign. "I just wanted to win this election," she told David Remnick during the Democratic National Convention in August about Democrats who didn't approve of her scheming. "So if they’re upset, I’m sorry for them. But the country is very happy."
In the days after 81-year-old Biden's career-ending presidential debate performance — you remember, the one when he did everything a coma victim would but drool on himself — Pelosi went public with her concerns. "I think it’s a legitimate question to say, is this an episode, or is this a condition?” she said on MSNBC about Biden's so-called "bad night."
Pelosi's leak campaign was a veritable deluge designed to drown a sitting president. “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” an unnamed Democrat told Politico in July. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
One House Democrat, also allowed to speak anonymously so they could say the really juicy stuff that Pelosi wanted to be made known, told Politico after Biden dropped out: "He got the message… It was from Chuck, Hakeem, Pelosi."
Slate's Jill Filipovic practically beamed, reporting the news in July:
The truth is: California Rep. Nancy Pelosi likes to win. And more than nearly any other Democrat in my lifetime, she knows how to. If Democrats do pull off a victory in November, it will be in large part because of her unsparing refusal to give into what felt like inevitable defeat.
"Could a President Harris be her greatest coup?" the Filipovic headline asked — to which I say, "PHRASING!"
"Coup" is just a bit too on-point, don't you think?
Pelosi and her minions seemed to enjoy flaunting her status as the woman who brought down a president through sheer force of will. “Would I do anything differently?" she said to reporters last month. "Why would you ask me that question? You know I’m a very deliberate person."
But this week she seems to have subtly changed her tune.
On Monday, the 84-year-old former House speaker was a guest on "The View" — or, as I usually think of it, "Mostly Older Ladies Shrieking At Things They Don't Know About." There, she presented a somewhat different story than the one she'd been so happy to tell and to have told about her.
Asked for the billionth time to tell the tale of how she helped force Biden out, this time she said, "My point [to Biden] was we need a better campaign." Hedging more, she continued, "So it wasn't about him not running. It's just, if this is the case, we have to run in a different way."
Now Pelosi wants us to believe she wasn't part of an intra-party coup to oust Biden. She just wanted him to run a better campaign and — oops! — he decided to drop out all on his little old lonesome.
"The president made his decision, patriotic, selfless, the most consequential president of modern times. This has been a great president of the United States," she added.
Why would Pelosi change her tune like that, unless she no longer wants to be associated with the increasingly apparent hot mess that is the Kamala Harris campaign?
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