Famed actor and lifelong Democrat George Clooney has abandoned President Biden as the party’s presidential nominee, saying the “dam has broken.”
“I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Mr. Clooney said in an op-ed published Wednesday in The New York Times.
“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he said of Mr. Biden, 81.
Mr. Clooney, who played a big role in the record-breaking Biden fundraiser last month, said the man he saw then is different from the one of the past.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” he wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
The president and his campaign blamed his shaky performance at the Georgia debate last month on a cold and his recent travel abroad. His incoherence against a strong and clear Donald Trump shook Democrats, and since then a growing number of them — in Congress and society — have called on Mr. Biden to quit the race.
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“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign,” Mr. Clooney said.
The actor, 63, said the discussion “is about age. Nothing more. But also nothing that can be reversed.”
“We are not going to win in November with this president,” he wrote. “On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate.”
He added, “This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private.”
He argued that it’s time for a new candidate, even if the process would be “messy.” He specifically mentioned Vice President Kamala Harris and Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Andy Beshear of Kentucky as possible replacements.
“We love to talk about how the Republican Party has ceded all power, and all of the traits that made it so formidable with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to a single person who seeks to hold on to the presidency, and yet most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” Mr. Clooney said.
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“But the dam has broken,” he said. “We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”
He called Mr. Biden “a hero [who] saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”
Mr. Biden has maintained that he is not dropping out despite growing calls for him to do so. He said Monday that he “wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024.”
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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