Bitter Pelosi now says Biden should have dropped out earlier so Democrats could have ‘open primary’

NY Post ^ | 11/08/24 | Diana Glebova

[Libloather]

Regrets, she has a few …

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) continued to work her way through the stages of grief following Vice President Kamala Harris’ election loss — this time blaming President Biden for not ending his bid for a second term earlier.

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the New York Times in comments published Friday.

“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”

The 84-year-old went on: “And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen.

“We live with what happened, and because the president endorsed Kamala 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.”

Biden, 81, did not endorse Harris in his July 21 announcement that he was dropping out of the 2024 race — instead issuing a second statement minutes later giving her his seal of approval.

The bizarre sequence triggered speculation that either Biden had to be persuaded to endorse his No. 2 or that he had tried to clear the field immediately in a display of petulance toward those who forced him out of the campaign.

Pelosi’s comments to the Times appeared to confirm the second theory, even though the former speaker had said during a September event hosted by Semafor: “We had an open primary and [Kamala Harris] won it.”

[lepton]

Sounds like a parallel to NE and Seattle in the Superbowl, when Belichick *should* have called a timeout but didn’t, and Seattle rushed to the line out of sorts and threw an interception right where Belichick predicted they would.