Is Nancy Pelosi Nervous?

At the end of yesterday's post, I speculated idly about the lizard people possibly replacing Nancy Pelosi -- I don't think she gives the ultimate orders any more than Barack Obama, and certainly nobody believes that about either Joe or Kamala. A few hours later, I saw that this isn't just a vain fancy. In an appearance on The View recounted by Ed Morrissey,

Pelosi attempts to claim that the Bidens got her all wrong two months ago. Pelosi didn't want Biden to withdraw at all, she now claims. She only wanted Biden to revamp his campaign after his disastrous debate performance . . .as though his campaign looked like it suffered from middle-stage dementia on June 27.

He cites a tweet by Jacqui Heinrich:

Pelosi on The View denies she wanted Biden to drop out, but says his campaign needed to change.

PELOSI: "My point was we need a better campaign, as I said, a decision to win. I didn't see us on a path to victory. So it wasn't about him not running. It's just if this is the…

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) September 9, 2024

The release of the New York Timwes/Siena poll \yesterday showed the race is in the same position it was just after Joe dropped out at Nancy's behest:

The results are essentially identical to the last time the New York Times/Siena poll asked voters for their preference in the aftermath of President Biden dropping out of the race in late July, with that poll also showing Trump with a 48-47 lead.

In fact, it looks to me as though we're in precisely the same place we were after July 13, when Nancy renewed her effort to get Joe to "do the right thing" and urged his long-term advisers to show him the polls -- when Joe insisted it was a margin-of-error race and Nancy finally got tough, saying something along the line of doing it the hard way or doing it the easy way.

In fact, I've got to surmise that if Nancy had internal polls that showed Joe in a significantly worse position than public polls at that time, any internal polls taken now probably reflect the same relative disadvantage for the Harris campaign now. In other words, the big switcheroo did nobody any good.

As Jacqui Heinrich pointed out in her tweet, though, Harris simply inherited the Biden campaign apparatus, less Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer, who apparently were made the scapegoats for Joe's June 27 debacle. Biden's campaign chair, Jen O'Malley Dillon, an Obama plant, is still the Harris campaign chair in Wilmington. Brian Fallon, who is felt to be Kamala's chief handler, worked in the same position as Kamala's handler with the Biden-Harris campaign.

As I pointed out in this post, most of the key people in the Harris campaign were Biden hires, with a few Obama inserts like David Plouffe. And as I pointed out yesterday, Kamala's debate prep strategy -- sequester the candidate with a studio duplicate, mock debates with a Trump surrogate, and policy cram sessions -- is precisely the one they had for Joe.

So I guess if I were a lizard person, I'd be asking Nancy and Kamala's handlers whether they might be doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. And Nancy might be nervous -- but what options do the lizard people have? In a different time and place, the organs of state security would have effected a discreet disappearance for Nancy, with her image being subsequently airbrushed from official photos. But let's face it, the time to get Joe to drop out of the race was two years ago, not this past July.

Instead, we got a cockamamie lawfare strategy that utterly backfired and as the campaign has developed, turns out to have been completely irrelevant. Who greenlighted that? If only figuratively, some people are going to have to be airbrushed.