George Clooney, actor, director, and Casamigo, has called for President Joseph Biden to step down in The New York Times. A proud Democrat who loves Joe Biden, Clooney considers Biden a friend, and like any good friend, he’s telling him to quit his job because he’s old. Clooney has long been the brave face of Tinseltown, where people talked about AIDS when it was “just being whispered” and Civil Rights when “it wasn’t really popular.” He co-hosted “the single largest fund-raiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever.” But all that money can’t stop time.
“The one battle he cannot win is the fight against time,” Clooney writes. “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.”
Since the debate, Biden hasn’t improved his perception within the party, and his unforced errors, like the Stephenopolis interview, have only made things worse. Meanwhile, the media has run with the “Incumbent presidential candidate is weaker than three-day-old dog shit” narrative, scaring the hell out of Democratic voters. If only someone had called for him to step aside earlier, say, over the ongoing war in Gaza, or the 2020 primary when a contingent of voters reminded our gerontocracy that this guy would be eighty-fucking-one in 2024.
Being a large-scale Democratic donor, Clooney has access to the real gossip. “Every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private” doesn’t think Biden can do the job “irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.” Currently, no one calling for him to step down has shown us what this process might look like because there is no historical precedent. There are no procedures or guidelines to follow. But, despite asking the party to wander into uncertainty, Clooney doesn’t want us to worry. The actor is sure “all of the scary stories that we’re being told about what would happen next are simply not true.” The money that Clooney collected for Biden would “help elect the presidential ticket and other Democrats. The new nominee wouldn’t be left off ballots in Ohio.” That’s all well and good, but he’s not exactly presenting a path to get there other than “let’s hear from Wes Moore and Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear and J.B. Pritzker and others.” Okay, then what?
With four months until the election, Clooney believes the time crunch would be a “benefit to us, not a danger,” giving “us a chance to showcase the future without so much opposition research and negative campaigning.” That’s a rosy way of looking at a party currently negatively campaigning against its own candidate. At least the debacle gave an overzealous conservative movement the confidence to reveal its terrifying and unpopular Project 2025 transition platform.
We at The A.V. Club are not political experts. We joke about Crazy Frog and watch all the Minions movies for fun and torture. We speak confidently about these things because we spend lots of time thinking about them. We base those ideas on our lived experience and expertise, so imagine our surprise at the absolute certainty with which this candidate swap is being discussed. If only we could be so bold as to tell millions of readers that we know how this thing that’s never happened before will play out.