The most devastating argument against Joe Biden’s re-election bid may have come not from a politician or a pundit, but from a film star.
But George Clooney, with his stinging New York Times opinion piece, isn’t the only one speaking out. A growing chorus from Democrats is sinking the president’s hopes of steadying his campaign this week – and perhaps ever.
This all comes after it appeared that the president had turned a corner, with the influential Congressional Black Caucus and key liberal members of Congress just voicing their support for him.
But now the ground has shifted once again – and all in the midst of a high-profile Nato summit with US allies here in Washington.
On Wednesday evening, Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democratic senator to openly call on Mr Biden to withdraw, “for the good of the country”, as he wrote in a newspaper op-ed.
The drumbeat of defections makes the stakes for Mr Biden’s press conference at the end of the Nato summit on Thursday afternoon even higher. It will be the biggest unscripted test for him since his botched debate two weeks prior which triggered this crisis.
Mr Biden also has a sit-down interview scheduled with NBC News presenter Lester Holt on Monday. A fumble or misstep in the days ahead could buttress all the most damaging assertions Mr Clooney, a top Democratic fundraiser, makes in his New York Times piece.
The actor writes that the president’s decline is not an illusion; it’s real. He points to a Los Angeles fundraiser he threw for the president last month. “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe… of 2010,” he writes. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
The president is not up to the task of beating Donald Trump in November, Clooney continues. He calls the Biden campaign’s claim that he is the choice of Democratic primary voters “disingenuous, at best”. And, perhaps most devastating, he says every prominent Democrat he has spoken with knows all this – whether they’re willing to publicly admit it or not.
“We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November”, he writes, “or we can speak the truth.”
