‘Lady McBiden’: Alexandra Pelosi Blasts the First Lady
The feud between the president and ex-speaker intensifies in the waning days of his presidency.
http://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/19/lady-mcbiden-alexandra-pelosi-first-lady-00199164
Since breaking her hip in Europe last month, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi has been deluged with messages, flowers and calls of concern from heads of state, colleagues in both parties and even royalty, most notably Luxembourg’s Grand Duke Henri, who was hosting her when she fell and has been solicitous through her recovery.
Yet it’s who she has not heard from that’s most remarkable, and that has infuriated Pelosi’s friends and family: Joe and Jill Biden.
Fueling that anger is Jill Biden’s continued, and now public, nursing of a grudge toward Pelosi for pushing the president to withdraw from last year’s campaign.
“If I was Lady McBiden, I’d put on my big girl pants, play the long game and think about my husband’s legacy,” Alexandra Pelosi, the former speaker’s daughter, told me Saturday. “There aren’t that many people left in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is one of them.” The younger Pelosi made clear she was speaking only for herself.
The deafening silence from the White House in response to a request for comment marks the culmination of the bitter feud between the president and onetime speaker, two of the age’s most prominent Democrats and the bookends of the party’s Obama-era high and Trump restoration low.
Since Pelosi helped engineer the parliamentary coup on Biden last summer, the president has refused to speak to her in any significant way, effectively ending his relationship with his pre-Baby Boom contemporary, the woman he once called “my Catholic sister.”
Biden has in recent weeks claimed he could have defeated Trump. More startling, the president has acknowledged he’s not sure he could have served a full second term, the vow he made as he insisted upon seeking reelection in the year he’d turn 82.
Yet when the history of this period is written, I have no doubt that Pelosi’s intervention will be seen as vital for her party. Had she, and other leading Democrats, not insisted Biden drop out of the race, Republicans would have harnessed his abysmal debate performance to claim even more congressional seats, doing even greater damage to Biden’s legacy.
I’ve yet to find anybody in either party, except Biden’s last defenders, who believe otherwise.
Pelosi has tried multiple times, I’m told, to have a conversation with Biden. But she and intermediaries who’ve also attempted a rapprochement have repeatedly been met with the same response from the president’s top advisers: The answer is no.
“She’s been told they’re not over it, don’t make more overtures because he’s blaming her,” said a person who has spoken to Pelosi about the conversations between the former speaker and Biden’s aides.
Pelosi told people last week she’s struck that the Bidens would leave on such a low note, asking rhetorically why they’d convey such bitterness.
A Biden spokesperson declined to speak on the record but did not deny the silence.
Steve Ricchetti, the Biden aide Pelosi knows best, did not respond to a text message.
Biden did briefly chat with Pelosi, her husband, Paul, and daughter Christine at a White House holiday party last month. But that encounter only served to remind them of the rupture.
The Pelosi family had not planned on entering the party’s receiving line. When they walked to the front, though, they were warmly greeted by the president, vice president and first gentleman. But Jill Biden was missing.
Any possibility that the first lady’s absence that night was coincidental was, in the mind of the Pelosi family, erased last week when Jill Biden used a Washington Post interview to go public with her anger toward the former speaker.
“We were friends for 50 years,” said the first lady. “It was disappointing.”
What’s disappointing to her intimates is that Biden seems to blame Pelosi alone for an intercession that most Democratic leaders, then and now, believe was imperative. And that’s after all Pelosi did as speaker to deliver the votes for Biden’s most significant accomplishments, first as vice president and then as president.
When I asked a longtime Biden adviser this week why he was so consumed with anger toward Pelosi and not, say, Barack Obama, the adviser said the president took it personally with Pelosi because they had a kinship whereas he had long recognized his Obama relationship was but a political arrangement.
It’s also common for family members of officeholders to take grudges more personally — and hold them longer. But the political converged with the personal after Pelosi slipped in Luxembourg.
Desperate to get her the best possible care in the initial hours after the accident, the Pelosis grappled with whether she should go to a U.S. military hospital, which she did, or immediately fly back home for care. And part of that trepidation, I’m told, owed to uncertainty about whether Biden would quickly get her a plane “because we have this wall at the White House,” as as one person familiar with the situation put it. (Another source said any concerns abated when White House staff heard the news and were swiftly responsive.)
WOOF ... that's a helluva lot of words just to say that the witches of the Democrat Party are being their usual bitchy selves!
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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