Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) criticized Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) after she heaped the blame on President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party’s sweeping losses last week.
With voters delivering President-elect Donald Trump the White House over Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, Pelosi was quick to point the finger at Biden, the Democratic incumbent in the White House, for Democrats’ bad night.
Fetterman begged to differ, taking a swipe at “godmother” Pelosi during an interview with Politico released Thursday.
“People like Pelosi, she really tried to — what’s the word I’m looking for? — she embraced this ‘She’s the godmother, she’s the enforcer.’ And now she’s blaming Biden,” Fetterman said. “Well, you can’t have it both ways. You got what you wanted, and now you’re still blaming Biden.”
Pelosi has spent nearly five decades in politics, starting out in her native California before rising to become the top House Democrat. She was elected speaker of the House in 2007 and assumed the position for a second time in 2019. Although she ceded the top role after Republicans won back the majority in the lower chamber three years later, Pelosi has retained elder status in the House and was among those pressuring Biden to drop his reelection bid this summer.
Pelosi’s, at best, lackluster enthusiasm for Biden in June and July came after she had enthusiastically backed his plans to campaign for a second term when he announced his intention to do so in April 2023.
Downplaying concerns about Biden’s age as “sidebar stuff,” Pelosi said last year that she was “very excited about the president announcing,” and pushed back against questions some Democrats had about his chances of winning reelection.
Fetterman is at least one congressional Democrat who has indicated that he would be glad to see Pelosi lose her grip over the party and leave the House.
During his Politico interview Thursday, he criticized the congresswoman’s recent move to file a statement of candidacy for her 21st term in the lower chamber.
“I think it’s really ironic that you have a woman at age 84 and she is still hanging on,” he said. “Why not give a younger generation an opportunity to occupy that seat?”
Fetterman’s comments come as he has emerged as a top critic within the Democratic Party, challenging in particular how party chiefs and Harris ran her unsuccessful presidential campaign.
Over the fall, he repeatedly warned the Democratic Party that Trump had made headwinds in his home state of Pennsylvania, which was key to delivering Republicans a victory on Election Day. During several postelection interviews, Fetterman has also criticized his party for how it treats men. He has frequently given negative feedback for Harris’s election-eve decision not to go on the Joe Rogan Experience, which has broad appeal to male voters, after Trump made a popular appearance on the podcast.
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“We have a challenge,” the Pennsylvania senator said during an interview with Semafor. “We have our own kind of ‘childless cat ladies’ situation: ‘Bros.’ People refer to these young guys as bros, and clearly that’s not a positive term.”
Fetterman continued to lament on Thursday: “Forty-two million people witnessed the Trump interview [with Rogan]. The power that the platform that he created — to ignore that, I can’t imagine why anyone would do that.”