Jonathan Martin writes:

Since breaking her hip in Europe last month, former Speaker 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. [Continue reading…]