George Clooney, we have recently learned, has just discovered that President Joe Biden is in severe mental decline.
Apparently, the television star does not own one himself. The man has access to a smartphone, assumedly, yet has never been on social media. No, the only way Clooney, a Democratic Party insider known for his boosterism, knew what was evident for anyone who’s seen video of the president these past five or so years, was to host a fundraiser for the president and look at him close up.
Now, the actor said in a New York Times Op-Ed that he wants Biden to step aside from running for another term based off this sudden realization. Not only that, but — like other left-of-center personages who likely have seen that Vice President Kamala Harris is about as popular as cryptosporidium poisoning, such as “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart — he wants something like an open primary after the primary season is over.
Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump had four words for Clooney’s sudden realization about Biden in a social media post: “get out of politics.”
Well, he said a bit more than that, saying the actor “never came close to making a great movie” and asked, rhetorically, “What does Clooney know about anything?”
Not a whole lot that the rest of the New York Times doesn’t know — but since he’s a famous actor whose line roughly echoes the Times’ on this and their writers are only famous within wonk circles, mostly, he got invited to join the steady drumbeat of voices from the paper’s opinion page calling for Biden to drop out.
In addition to an editorial less than 24 hours after Biden’s debate debacle on June 27 demanding he step aside as nominee — then another editorial piece earlier this week, after it became clear Biden was refusing to step aside, titled “The Democratic Party Must Speak the Plain Truth to the President” and tell him he needs to step aside — Clooney contributed a Wednesday essay titled “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.”
In it, the “lifelong Democrat” who brags about having “led some of the biggest fund-raisers in my party’s history” for presidential candidates talks in broad terms about coming face-to-face with the Joe Biden America saw up on a debate stage on June 27 at one of those fundraisers.
“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,” Clooney wrote.
Do you agree with Trump?
“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
No word from the “Oceans Eleven” actor on where the Joe “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains!” Biden of 2012 or the Joe “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” Biden of 2019 fit on this scale, but George says it’s time for Joe to go.
“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 [at the debate],” Clooney wrote in the Wednesday.
“We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign,” he added. “The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, whom we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.”
Well, that sounds like your own fault, now, doesn’t it? The party already had four years to talk about what would happen in the event Joe Biden couldn’t carry on, which wasn’t an impossibility given his age, frail-seeming nature and the frequency with which gaffes kept occurring.
Not only did they not come to any decision on how to handle it, the party basically chose a nominating process which favored Biden and gave prospective big-name nominees the cold shoulder. The biggest elected name he faced was Rep. Dean “Who?” Phillips of Minnesota, and the biggest name in the race — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — was essentially disowned by his own powerful family before deciding to drop out and run as an independent.
But, Clooney says, it’s “disingenuous, at best, to argue that Democrats have already spoken with their vote and therefore the nomination is settled and done, when we just received new and upsetting information.” Oh, you mean like the stuff that’s been appearing on news channels and social media since, say, Biden started running in 2019? That information?
So, Clooney wants something like an open primary in the weeks before the convention, only a really nice open primary where candidates say nothing but fuzzy things about each other, something that’s going to be about as easy as getting all the children under the age of 5 in the United States to clap their hands simultaneously.
“Let’s hear from [Maryland Gov.] Wes Moore and Kamala Harris and [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer and [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom and [Kentucky Gov.] Andy Beshear and [Illinois Gov.] J.B. Pritzker and others,” he wrote. “Let’s agree that the candidates not attack one another but, in the short time we have, focus on what will make this country soar. Then we could go into the Democratic convention next month and figure it out.
“Would it be messy? Yes. Democracy is messy. But would it enliven our party and wake up voters who, long before the June debate, had already checked out? It sure would.”
In other words, the guy who spent the first part of his piece bragging about how he’s a huge fundraiser for the Democratic Party in general and Biden in particular spent the second part talking about how he was just as clueless as the guy on the couch at home.
If that’s the case, Trump said in a post on Truth Social, his place isn’t in politics or on the Times’ opinion page writing guest essays.
“So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act. He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are,” Trump said. “What does Clooney know about anything?
“He uses the Democrat ‘talking point’ that Biden, the WORST President in the history of the United States, has ‘saved our Democracy.’
“No, Crooked Joe was the one who WEAPONIZED Law Enforcement against his political Opponent, who created the most devastating INFLATION in the history of our Country, who Embarrassed our Nation in Afghanistan, and whose crazy Open Border Policy has allowed millions of people to illegally pour into our Country, many from prisons and mental institutions.”
“Crooked Joe Biden didn’t save our Democracy, he brought our Democracy to its knees,” Trump added. “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!”
Now, to be fair, I like a few Clooney movies: “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Three Kings,” “Michael Clayton” and “Grizzly II: Revenge,” among others. That being said, if he’s as good at politics as he is at acting, I’m kind of wondering if I like those films in spite of Clooney, not because of him.
That said, like most actors who try to become activists via lending their names to causes and candidates, Clooney is pretty much out of his depth here. This has been a known problem for anyone who cared to look over the past four years. The closest the actor gets to something approximating truth in his Op-Ed is when he says that certain people — he doesn’t mention himself, of course — refuse to look because they don’t want to bear the thought of Donald Trump winning another term.
This is the Democrats’ problem. There’s no easy way out of it, certainly not the pie-in-the-sky method endorsed by Clooney which would somehow facilitate the neatest, most orderly way to do a “messy” job.
They had a chance to plan for it after Biden secured the White House, refused to, and then decided in late June of this year, long after the primary process had completed, that it was high time the president leave the campaign trail to be substituted for someone who comes across a bit better. It doesn’t exactly work that way, alas — and anyone who thinks it does not need to be giving us their unqualified opinion on the matter.
