This week, actor George Clooney wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling on Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. The move came mere weeks after Clooney co-hosted a fundraiser for Biden, which brought in $30 million for his campaign.
According to a new report, Clooney informed former President Barack Obama about the op-ed, and Obama did nothing to discourage him from going forward with it.
"While Obama did not encourage or advise Clooney to say what he said, he also didn’t object to it, we’re told from people familiar with their exchange," Politico reported Thursday. "The lack of pushback is an eye-popping revelation given that the former president was one of the first big voices defending Biden following his abysmal debate performance (while many of his former aides have been some of the incumbent’s biggest critics)."
Obama's connection to the letter was widely suspected because of Clooney and Obama's friendship.
"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," Clooney wrote in his brutal op-ed.
Related: Biden Said to Judge His Performance at the NATO Summit. Let's Do That.
Clooney continued, "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.”
"Is it fair to point these things out?” Clooney asked. "It has to be. This is about age. Nothing more. But also nothing that can be reversed. We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate."
Many people in Obama's orbit have been critical of Biden.
"Look, I think there is merit to it," former Obama adviser David Axelrod said Wednesday. "But the thing about the piece, Dana, that I thought was particularly impactful was Clooney, who just hosted a fundraiser, a major fundraiser for the president a few weeks ago in California, said, 'You can't win the battle against time. None of us can. It is devastating to say, but Joe Biden, I was—the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe Biden of 2010. He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.' That is devastating; that's devastating."
Former Obama adviser Jon Favreau also agreed.
"It was not surprising to any of us who were at the fundraiser. I was there. Clooney was exactly right, and every single person I talked to at the fundraiser thought the same thing, except for the people working for Joe Biden, or at least they didn't say that," Favreau, told CNN. "I remember my wife, Emily, turned to me after the fundraiser and said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, there is a debate in a week. Either he’ll do well in the debate, and we'll think he was just tired because he flew all the way back from Europe, and that'll be that, or he'll be like this at the debate and then the whole country will be talking about it. So, here we are."
Favreau, along with former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett and former advisor Tommy Vietor, also blasted Biden on the podcast they co-host.
"I thought it was bad, and, at times, very hard to watch," Vietor said during the podcast of Biden's interview with George Stephanopoulos last week.
"The debate was just a bad night. We all saw it," Lovett said. "The explanations are kind of vague… That doesn't do enough to assuage our concerns about what we saw that night. Right? So, the explanations don't offer anything."
The dam surely has broken.
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