Nancy Pelosi on Monday ignored questions about her low-key feud with former Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn.
The former House speaker was instrumental in getting Biden to drop his 2024 bid, frustrating some of the president’s top allies.
“Nobody wants to fight with Nancy Pelosi right now because we are a united party,” former Biden adviser Dunn said on CNN.
Pelosi responded on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, telling reporters she “just wanted to win.”
“I have a relationship with the president and I just wanted to win this election. So if they are upset, I feel sorry for them, but the country is very happy,” he explained. “I don’t know who they are, but you know that’s their problem, not mine.”
When pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash about her own involvement in Biden’s decision, she said her concern was “not about the president, it was about his campaign” and that “he did the right thing.”‘The decision for the country.’
But when Tapper specifically asked Pelosi about Dunn’s comments about not wanting to fight her “right now,” Pelosi bemusedly replied, “Sometimes you just have to take a hit for the kids.”
Nancy Pelosi ignored questions about her low-key feud with former Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn
Tapper replied: ‘So that’s what you’re doing now? You’re going to take the beatings for the kids?’
As Bash chimed in, confused, asking Pelosi directly: “Who’s doing the slamming?”
Pelosi shifted her stance and talked about Harris’s huge boost compared to Biden.
“So why are we talking about this?” he continued, adding a laugh.
His comments came on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, where Democrats will formally nominate Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to lead their ticket.
Pelosi was known to be quietly working behind the scenes to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. While Biden kept saying he wouldn’t step aside, Pelosi ignored his insistence and argued that the door was still open and she needed to make a decision.
“Nobody wants to pick a fight with Nancy Pelosi right now because we are a united party,” Dunn said on CNN Monday.
Nearly a month ago, on July 21, Biden succumbed to intense pressure and dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. Democrats quickly lined up behind Vice President Kamala Harris to be at the top of their ticket.
Earlier this month, Dunn took a direct jab at Pelosi when she blamed “certain leaders” for Democrats losing the House of Representatives in 2022.
“The task before us is to win this election and not let Donald Trump become president again and win the House of Representatives, which, if certain leaders in 2022 had done a slightly better job, perhaps today we would control it, but that is not the case,” he said.
“That’s the task before us,” Dunn added. “And it’s critical because, as the president has said, this country is at an inflection point.”
Dunn, a longtime Biden adviser who left to join a pro-Harris super PAC, said Biden’s decision to step back and throw his full support behind Vice President Harris was the biggest part of his legacy.
“You know, it was tough. And there’s nothing that reflects the vice president’s legacy, because I think one of the most important things about Joe Biden’s legacy is that he made sure that there was a channel where Kamala Harris was the natural person that everyone would turn to if something happened to him,” she told Politico in an interview.
Dunn also disputed characterizations of his debate disaster as catastrophic, even though it precipitated the end of his campaign.
“Voters didn’t particularly like Biden’s performance in the first half hour. He wasn’t getting good results at all. But it’s not like they’ve gone away,” he said. “They really liked much of the second half of the debate because of Joe Biden. They hated Donald Trump.”
He recalled “24 days of relentless negative and horrible attacks against Joe Biden.”
Among her sharpest comments was a counterattack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been relentless in her comments about Biden while showering him with praise. Harris’s numbers have soared, injecting what her running mate Tim Walz calls “joy” into the campaign and convincing Democrats she has a fighting chance.
“It is clear that there were party leaders who decided to make it public and that gave permission to other people to make it public,” he said.
During the brutal post-debate cooling-off period, some Democrats criticized Biden’s team for agreeing to an earlier-than-usual contest with Donald Trump and for failing to share the weaknesses that resulted in what the White House at the time called a “bad night.”
“So (former President) Trump didn’t gain any ground in the debate, and we actually got some votes in the caucus. So it was a bad debate, but it didn’t seem catastrophic at all, certainly in terms of voters,” Dunn said.
“I think other people who have done independent research have seen pretty much the same thing. If you look at the polls, what you’ll see is that we didn’t see a lot of movement in the debate because the structure of this campaign had been pretty static for a long time and the debate didn’t change it.”
On a recent press tour, Pelosi also described Biden’s decision as a key part of her legacy, but she also told the New Yorker that after the debate she knew Biden would not win.