PENTWATER, MI – The political world knows that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi played a key role last month in pressuring President Joe Biden not to run for a second term.
But what they don’t know, former Michigan Gov. James Blanchard told me, is that she played at least as much of a role in getting him to run four years ago.
“She came up to me at a fundraiser in a Washington restaurant. I think it was very early in 2019, and said ‘Aren’t you close to Biden? You have to get him to run. He’s the only one who can win!”
Blanchard, these days an influential Washington lawyer, has known both President Biden and Pelosi for decades. He and Biden are exactly the same age, and got to Congress just two years apart, one as a young senator from Delaware in 1973, and the other as a freshman congressman from Michigan in 1975.
Nancy Pelosi, who at 84 is two years older than both men, wasn’t elected to Congress till 1987, but then rapidly rose in leadership ranks. Blanchard served four terms in the House, then was governor of Michigan for eight years. After he was defeated for a third term, President Bill Clinton appointed him ambassador to Canada, where he won considerable praise for his political skills.
“Best ambassador Washington ever sent us,” several Canadian officials later said of Mr. Blanchard, especially after he quietly and diplomatically helped prevent Quebec from voting to secede, something the United States didn’t want to happen.
When the then-Speaker of the House approached Blanchard at that long-ago fundraiser, he agreed that Joe Biden was the right candidate, and promised to endorse him. “I knew Joe, certainly, but I wasn’t that close to him,” Blanchard said. But he was close to someone who was very close to Biden: Former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, who he had known since the two entered Congress together.
Blanchard swiftly let Dodd know he was on board, and the Biden campaign was off and running. Until a few weeks ago, the former governor expected to spend this fall campaigning for the President’s reelection. But then came the disastrous June 27 debate.
Soon after that, Blanchard was at an event where President Biden spoke. “His speech was fine, but afterwards, when he was mingling with us, he seemed a bit hazy.”
Democrats began to panic. Nancy Pelosi was among a number of leaders who gently pressed the President not to run. Mr. Biden insisted he was in the race to stay — until Sunday afternoon, July 21, when he abruptly sent a message on X, the former Twitter, that he was dropping out. Since then, reports are that Biden’s long friendship with Pelosi has been damaged, perhaps beyond repair.
“That would be a tragedy, because, I can tell you that Nancy Pelosi absolutely loves Joe Biden. There is no one in Washington who loves him as much as she does. And she’s the only one he would have listened to. They go back years,” Blanchard said.
He believes that of all the senior leaders in the Democratic Party, Pelosi would have been the only one the President would have listened to. “She just did what she had to do for the party,” he added.
“I am convinced that she was the best and most effective speaker in modern history,” he added.
Blanchard, who seems remarkably younger than his 82 years, said he is looking forward to campaigning for Kamala Harris this fall in Michigan, where he and his wife Janet have two homes, one in the Detroit suburbs and one on the west side of the state.
He is very optimistic, “but we can’t get complacent. I think it is a three-point race, either way,” something he said also applies to the open U.S. Senate race between Democrat Elissa Slotkin and Republican Mike Rogers. Indeed, nobody knows more than Jim Blanchard how volatile and unreliable polls can be. He was running for a third term as governor in 1990, and a final poll showed him ahead of Republican John Engler, 56 to 40 percent.
But turnout was dismal, and he lost by less than one percent of the vote. Many feel that had he won, he, not Al Gore, might have been Bill Clinton’s choice for vice president. The men were close, and the paring would have made sense in terms of geographic balance.
“You never know,” Blanchard said. “But if I had been reelected, I wouldn’t have been ambassador to Canada, and that was a tremendous, life-changing experience.
There are, he agreed, second chances and surprise outcomes in both life and politics, and in both arenas, it “ain’t over till it’s over.” Sometimes, as Yogi Berra didn’t say, not even then.
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Footnote: Blanchard was interviewed as he prepared to go to Chicago, where he is serving this week as one of Michigan’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention. “I’ve now been a delegate to 13 conventions –I wonder if that’s a record?” he said.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
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