‘He knows I love him’: Pelosi’s message to Biden

(CNN) — Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revealed in a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead” that she still has not spoken to President Joe Biden since he decided to step down in the wake of his disastrous debate performance.

“No,” Biden and Pelosi haven’t talked, she said, but the California Democrat insists that isn’t unusual. “He knows I love him.”

In the interview Thursday, Pelosi shed new light on her analysis of Biden’s debate performance. Ahead of the debate, Pelosi said that she had warned Biden not to participate.

“I thought we were going to see Joe Biden from the State of the Union,” Pelosi said. “I never wanted him to debate what’s-his-name because it’s always a joke. It’s not a funny joke, but it’s a joke. And he said, ‘No, I’m looking forward to it,’ you know, and so he was confident about that.”

The former speaker also said that Biden came off as “over-prepared” during the debate.

“You know why you’re here,” she said. “You know what you care about, you know how you want to get things done. You want to show people what’s in your heart. You don’t have to memorize anything. You don’t have to have days of prepping. So when I saw – I thought, in my view, over-prepped. Not, not a good idea.”

Asked about Biden’s ultimate decision to step aside, Pelosi replied, “He made a decision,” and “his legacy is a great legacy.”

“It’s a legacy we share because our members created some of that, voted for it, but it’s – Joe Biden was the inspiration and a strategic leader of all of this, and he deserves credit for that as well as for many other things in his career before that,” Pelosi said.

“I think history will honor him as a selfless person, a selfless leader,” she added.

The former speaker has been tight-lipped about what sort of role she played in the days leading up to Biden’s decision to step aside. “At some point, I will come to terms with my, to peace, with my own role in this,” she told the Associated Press.

“I think that part of all of our goals in this was to preserve his legacy, a fabulous legacy, that would go right down the drain if Bozo got elected to the White House,” she added, referring to former President Donald Trump.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Pelosi emphasized that she remains focused on keeping Trump out of office, and that any actions she took were to make sure “that Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

Pressed on her comments on Biden’s future on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last month, Pelosi admitted that she had concerns about the race.

“But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen,” she told the New Yorker. “The president has to make the decision for that to happen. People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines, I was talking to (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer). I didn’t talk to Chuck at all.”

“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there,” she added. “So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next.”

In the CNN interview, Pelosi also defended the new Democratic ticket against attacks that Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are too left-leaning.

On CNN, Pelosi dismissed criticisms of the Democratic ticket and emphasized that she is “so proud of our House member,” Walz, now the Minnesota governor who was previously a congressman, after he was added to the ticket this week.

“Tim is fabulous, and we’re happy to have a House member there,” she said.

“They’re calling Tim Walz a progressive. He was right down the center in the House,” added Pelosi. “We’re all progressives. It’s a question of how left wing we might be and all of that.”

She continued, “They will govern from the center because you must, and they have to be perceived that way. So I wouldn’t pay any attention to how the other side – we don’t agonize, we organize.”

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