George Clooney said during a recent sit-down on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” that he had no regrets about writing his New York Times op-ed insisting that former president Joe Biden bow out of the 2024 presidential election. However, in hindsight, he feels that it was a “mistake” to have Kamala Harris step in for Biden as the democratic nominee.
When asked if he would write his NYT op-ed again if given the chance, Clooney replied, “Yes. We had a chance. I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary. Let’s battle-test this quickly and get it up and going. I think the mistake with it being Kamala is she had to run against her own record. It’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person.’ It’s hard to do, and so she was given a very tough task. I think it was a mistake, quite honestly. But we are where we are. We were gonna lose more House seats, they say. So I don’t know. To not do it would be to say, ‘I’m not gonna tell the truth.’”
After Biden’s disastrous performance during his first presidential debate with Donald Trump, many in Hollywood called for him to step aside for a more capable candidate. Clooney became the de facto face of this movement after his July 2024 essay. In it, he wrote of Biden, “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. 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. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”
After facing backlash for the piece, Clooney told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he felt it was his “civic duty” to call attention to what he believed was an imperative issue.
“That’s the deal, you have to take your stand if you believe in it,” he said. “Take a stand, stand for it and then deal with the consequences. That’s the rules, so when people criticize me — they criticized me for my stance against the war 20 years ago, people picketed my movies and they put me on a deck of cards — I have to take that, that’s fair. I’m OK with that, I’m OK with criticism for where I stand. I defend their right to criticize me as much as I defend my right to criticize them.”
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