Netflix canceled House of Cards many years ago, but if they ever need a plot for a new season, they could spend a dozen episodes exploring what happened during the week-long period when Joe Biden was being pushed out of his re-election campaign.
There was plenty of palace intrigue at the time but now we’re getting some leaks and reports from people close to the situation like Nancy Pelosi by way of the New York Times. There’s a reason it’s coming out now, of course, since Kamala Harris just lost an electoral landslide to Donald Trump.
The blame game is on in full force and a lot of fingers are pointing at Joe Biden for better or worse.
According to a New York Times report, Pelosi claims that the plan was for Biden to step down and allow time for a mini-primary of sorts to take place:
Former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said if President Joe Biden had ended his reelection bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”
Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen.”
She said that since Biden endorsed Harris immediately, “that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
The last line is key. The fact that Pelosi mentions Biden’s immediate endorsement of Harris sounds like that wasn’t part of the plan.
If you recall back to July 21, Biden released a letter via his X account announcing his intention to exit the race. In the post, Biden touted some of his accomplishments, announced he would step aside, and thanked Kamala Harris for her service as Vice President but offered no endorsement. That was at 1:46 pm.
Approximately 27 minutes later, Biden released a second post explicitly endorsing Harris as his successor.
From what it sounds like now, that was not part of the Pelosi-Obama plan to remove Biden and put someone else in his place. It’s worth noting that Obama waited a very long time before offering any support for Harris.
In fact, NBC News was reporting four days later on July 25 that Obama would endorse Harris “soon”:
Obama privately has fully supported Harris’ candidacy and plans to endorse her soon, these people said.
“He has been in regular contact with her and thinks she’s been off to a great start,” one of them said.
Obama is one of the only high-profile Democrats in the country who has yet to endorse Harris. While other party leaders have stepped forward to publicly back her, he has so far kept his support private.
All of this lines up with what Pelosi offered to the New York Times.
The plan was to have a mini-primary of some kind and make Kamala Harris sink or swim on her own. The outcome could have been more division in the party but it seems like Obama and others already knew Harris was a loser from the start. Sure, she was next in line but she was also a terrible candidate and perhaps the weakest option even though she was the sitting vice president.
We’ll never never quite know what happened but we’re getting bits and pieces as plenty of people play the CYA game trying to deflect blame on the lame-duck president in his remaining few months of power.
It’s almost as if Biden said fine, I’ll leave, but I’m sticking you with Harris as your consolation prize, suckers!
The truth in all this is that Harris was a terrible option to begin with. No amount of time or money was going to make her a credible national candidate. She was given every opportunity to sound like a leader and failed at every turn.
Beyond that, America was more than ready to turn the page on the Biden-Harris fiasco and put the real adults back in charge.
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