She went on Biden’s favorite show to say, ‘It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run.’ Everybody knows what’s going on here.
Joe Biden must be feeling depressingly unheard and misunderstood these days. People just don’t seem to believe him when he swears he’s not leaving this race. Me, I’m easily confused myself, but I would have sworn I’d heard from Capitol Hill messaging, White House communications, media reports, depressed Democrats, and even Joe Biden himself <shuffles papers audibly> that the president is “in it to win it.” He’s sticking this thing out, keeping the faith, dying with his boots on, staying until the last dog (or dog-faced pony soldier) is hung, and all that other folksy blatherskite that used to pour from Biden’s perpetually open mouth before he lost the ability to do even that.
Meanwhile, get this: Nancy Pelosi, of all people, doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. This morning, the former speaker appeared downright confused about whether Joe Biden has decided to stay in this race or not, and given what’s been happening to Biden recently, this might give us cause to worry. Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe — a show President Biden happens to watch religiously — she seemed not to grasp that both Biden and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself have declared that “the matter is closed.” Instead, she said it might be a good idea to wait and let the president have a week to figure things out, which of course felt accidentally patronizing given how publicly Biden has let it be known that he refuses to quit.
It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to to make that decision. Because time is running short . . . I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides we go with . . . Let’s just hold off. Whatever you’re thinking, either tell somebody privately, but you don’t have to put that out on the table until we see how we go this week.
Look, everybody knows what’s going on here. Nancy Pelosi is obviously no fool, no matter how old she looks — she does not suffer from Joe Biden’s ailment — and she knows full well that Biden has already “made that decision.” She went on national television — on his favorite show, no less — to politely offer him the chance to reconsider that decision. The House Democrats are heading toward a disastrous turfing even if the polls remain where they currently are; if the bottom continues falling out for Biden you’re going to begin to see freakish results. (Talk then turns to which of the Democratic Senate seats falls first; all incumbent Democrats are running well ahead of Biden, but you can only ever run so far ahead of an onrushing wave.)
It all inevitably made one think of that immortal scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail set during a medieval plague, except this time it’s Nancy Pelosi who has somehow heaved a stiffened old Joe Biden over her shoulders and is hauling him against his will to the corpse-wagon:
MEDIA: Bring out your dead!
PELOSI: Here’s one!
BIDEN: (moans weakly) I’m not dead!
PELOSI: Well he will be soon, he’s obviously very ill.
BIDEN: (with a voice as soft as silt) I’m getting better!
PELOSI: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.
MEDIA: Oh, I can’t take him like that, it’s against regulations.
BIDEN: I don’t want to go on the cart! Jim? Where’s Jim?
PELOSI: Oh don’t be such a baby, Joe.
The former speaker is one of only two people Joe Biden has mentioned in public as a fellow elected Democrat whose opinion he takes to heart. (The other is South Carolina CBC grandee Jim Clyburn.) She spoke softly and as diplomatically as possible this morning, but extremely clearly. If Biden insists on remaining, then I suspect the next time she may not be nearly as diplomatic, and may simply offer him up as a sacrifice for the media to whack. And just like Monty Python’s cart-master, we’ll “see you on Thursday.”