In early July 2024, actor George Clooney, who had just hosted a major fundraiser for then-President Joe Biden's re-election campaign, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for Biden to drop out of the race.
Clooney is now opening up about the plea he made to Biden.
While Clooney says he does not regret asking Biden to abandon his campaign, he admits that it was a big mistake to replace him with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
The op-ed from Clooney was titled, "George Clooney: I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee."
Clooney spent a lot of the ink that filled the white space by gushing over Biden’s political career, then pivoting to concerns about the man he saw on stage during a presidential debate against Donald Trump.
He admitted that replacing Biden after he already won the nomination would be messy, but he also believed it would serve to “wake up voters who, long before the June debate, had already checked out.” That is a very clever way of acknowledging that the idea of a withdrawal was a sort of political stunt to get the Democrats back into the race.
Clooney concluded, “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”
The amusing aspect of all this is that Clooney had moved his family to France, living the dream abroad while trying to influence policies that, for all intents and purposes, have very little effect on his personal life, especially when it comes to immigration, but I digress.
Clooney was recently asked about the op-ed and whether he had any regrets about writing it.
He responded that he had no regrets about asking Biden to step down, but he was upset the Democrats did not follow his suggested plan for an open primary, stating, "We had a chance. I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary. Let’s battle-test this quickly and get it up and going."
Clooney also addressed Hunter Biden’s recent rant against him during an unhinged YouTube interview, in which the former first son claimed that Barack Obama put Clooney up to penning the op-ed. Clooney responded to that, stating, "But the reality is, I don’t think looking backwards like that is helpful to anyone, particularly to him. I don’t think it’s helpful for the Democratic Party, and so I’m just gonna wish him well on his ongoing recovery and I hope he does well and just leave it at that. I have many personal opinions about it, but I don’t find it to be helpful to have a public spat with him."
Clooney, as noted above, was not happy that the Democrats anointed Harris without any type of a primary race, which the little whispering birds have also indicated was something that also had Obama a bit upset.
The Hollywood star stated, “I think the mistake with it being Kamala is she had to run against her own record. It’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person.’”
He continued, “It’s hard to do, and so she was given a very tough task. I think it was a mistake, quite honestly.”
Regardless of how the election turned out, I always thought the GOP missed a huge opportunity to challenge Harris' nomination on constitutional grounds as a way to expose how Democrats tried to hijack the election. I still believe the Republican Party figured that it would save that move just in case Trump lost, but I think the American people needed to know if what the Democrats did was even allowable by law, which I do not believe it was. You don’t just get to discard the vote of the American people because you don’t like the way an election was going.
