Nancy Pelosi was still the most powerful House speaker in history less than two years ago, and she reached that position after years of earning the trust of generations of members. While she has, technically, returned to the backbench to focus on bridge repairs in San Francisco, she’s still the one Democrats will turn to for leadership in a crisis—and she can still move markets. She did so this week. After Biden had appeared to shore up his position among House Democrats early in the week, Pelosi appeared Wednesday on Morning Joe—a show she did not need to appear on that particular morning—and said of Biden’s future that “it’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” and that “we’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short.” That was sent to and received by members as a signal that this remained a live issue. It was an unmissable message that Pelosi had seen the data, and that it was bad. She is the most trusted party elder right now to manage a dire situation like this, and almost all of the work will be done behind the scenes. (If this situation had come a few years earlier, her peer power broker, Harry Reid, would’ve simply gone on TV and announced who he’d picked to be the new nominee.) If Biden does decide to drop out, do not be surprised if his last phone call was from Nancy Pelosi.

The other party elder to whom Democrats have been looking to figure “all this” out is Barack Obama. As a CNN report Thursday noted, he and Pelosi have been in touch about the way forward. (“When the history of this extraordinary two-week period of American politics is written,” CNN wrote that their sources had told them, “the fingerprints of Obama and Pelosi will be far more apparent than currently known.”) But this is a tricky situation for Obama. Much of Biden’s stubbornness in this moment can be traced to his experience in the Obama administration. Biden resented the Obama team—“elites,” one might call them—cracking jokes about him behind his back, condescending to him as “Uncle Joe.” Biden seethed for years after Obama steered Biden out of running for president in 2016 in favor of Hillary Clinton, who promptly lost to a television host who would go on to attempt a coup. All of which is to say that Biden has a real complex about Obama. When Team Biden sees David Axelrod and the lads of Pod Save America turning so sharply against them following the debate, it rekindles the old angst about Team Obama looking down on them, underestimating them, as they always have. The harder Obama pushes, in other words, the more spectacularly it could backfire. They don’t make dyads like this anymore, folks!

Speaking of the Long Reach of Obama Elites, actor George Clooney wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this week calling on Biden to step aside. It earned an extraordinary amount of attention. Two preliminary thoughts: 1) Dems should just nominate George Clooney for president. He’d win, right? Nominate his ass. 2) Why do people care so much what George Clooney thinks? Well, they do. But aside from whatever good points Clooney may have made about Biden’s brain, there was an embarrassing admission within it. Clooney referenced the major fundraiser he’d hosted for Biden, featuring special guest Barack Obama, a few weeks ago. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” Was Clooney … going to share that information had there not been a debate? Were these Democrats suddenly coming out now talking about how “dazed and confused” Biden was at the Juneteenth concert last month going to share that information? These were events at which Biden’s appearance—looking completely lost at the Juneteenth celebration, being led offstage by Obama at the Clooney fundraiser—raised eyebrows at the time, but Democrats dismissed those concerns as right-wing “misinformation” and “cheap fakes.” Since the debate, Democrats like Clooney—who again, Dems should probably nominate for president??—are admitting to the conspiracy of silence, shattered by the debate, that Republicans have accused them of. 

Now that we’ve talked about those running circles around him, we might as well check in on the old codger himself. Is he going to make it or not? Right now, that’s a day-to-day question, as betting markets do a neat job of charting. On the one hand, House and Senate Democrats seem to have decided among themselves—some publicly, hundreds more privately—that Biden can’t be the nominee. But they haven’t crossed the Rubicon yet of moving en masse to force him out. And each day that they don’t do that is a success for Biden. Biden’s "big boy" press conference Thursday evening was handled just competently enough for him to stave off the dogs for the time being, if not to assure Democrats that the debate performance itself was a complete aberration. This weekend will be a critical choke point, as Biden’s team is likely hoping it can make it until the Republican National Convention begins on Monday and diverts some of the spotlight away from the president’s troubles. But the most notable quote from Biden’s press conference was him ever-so-slightly cracking open the door to dropping out. He said that he wouldn’t drop out unless his team’s polls “came back and said there’s no way you can win.” We’ll see what data is shown to him over the weekend.

The Surge just fell out of a coconut tree and had a thought. People have, for a long time, treated the idea of Vice President Kamala Harris as the alternative to Biden as a reason to keep Biden. To avoid that fate, fantasies of a "mini-primary" have been thrown around, in which the likes of Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, etc. could all run, culminating in a convention finale. (Sort of like an in-season NBA tournament.) But what if Harris is indeed the most desirable alternative, not just the default alternative? And not just for the logistical ease that would accompany moving her up one slot on the ticket, either. As much as people might excite themselves over the promise of someone like Whitmer, Harris has seen things that Whitmer wouldn’t believe. Harris has spent the past five years in the horror, the sheer waking horror, that is serving at the highest levels of national politics. Satan awaits her each morning as she wakes up, and she’s lived to tell about it. There’s no knowing how a promising—but unseasoned nationally—governor might handle the sort of soul-rending experience that would await him or her over the next few months. We also feel like Harris has been devalued to the point of people wholly forgetting her real political skills. She would get the message out. She would defend and push the substantial accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration. And she could turn in the debate performance against Donald Trump that finally electrifies Democrats. (Is that good enough, KHive? Now will you return us our children?)

Those goody two-shoes in the Republican Party think they’re so special, already ~knowing~ who they’re going to nominate for president. What a bunch of teacher’s pets. What we still do not know the weekend before the Republican National Convention, though, is who Donald Trump will select as his running mate. The betting favorite is freshman Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, followed by North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. We don’t entirely get this pick, if Vance is the pick. Yes, Vance is intelligent and a smooth speaker, but he’s also one of those New Right headcases who tends to scare the children—and Trump already has that demographic locked down. We guess it’s just that he’s friends with Don Jr., who’s scheduled to speak ahead of the vice presidential nominee on Wednesday. One concern about Vance, though, is that Trump likes his politicians clean-shaven, and Vance has a beard. Further, Vance can’t shave his beard, because then he would look like a goober. Trump was asked about the Beard Issue in an interview this week, but he said it wasn’t a problem, observing that Vance “looks like a young Abraham Lincoln.” Hmm. Maybe if you stretched Lincoln’s face from portrait to landscape orientation and got A.I. Lincoln to rail passionately against Ukraine instead of slavery, we could see it? A little?

Consider that it wasn’t just Biden’s team taking shots at George Clooney following the publication of his op-ed calling on Biden to drop out. Trump, as well, issued a scorching statement against Clooney. Among other insults, Trump posted that “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!” You’re beginning to see Republicans, heading into their convention in a commanding position, freak out that Democrats really will replace their nominee. You have conservative columnists putting together arguments that Democratic “elites” (there go those elites again!) replacing their nominee would be a grave injustice to Democratic primary voters, whose concerns are of paramount importance to the right-wing commentariat. On this matter, we’d encourage you to read Tim Alberta’s characteristically excellent profile of Trump’s co-campaign managers, and the apparatus they’ve spent years building specifically to defeat Joe Biden on the basis of him being old. The freakout on the right that will ensue should Democrats swap out Biden could be the sort of unifying point-and-laugh situation that brings Democrats back together.