Pelosi refuses to endorse Biden as Clooney says president should not run

Washington: First came the party elder; then came the movie star.

In yet another damaging blow to Joe Biden, former Democrat House speaker Nancy Pelosi has refused to explicitly endorse the US president as the party’s election candidate, declaring that “it’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run.”

President Joe Biden shakes hands with George Clooney during the Kennedy Centre honourees reception at the White House in Washington, December 2022.Credit: AP

Soon after, lifelong Democrat and donor George Clooney, who headlined a star-studded fundraiser for Biden only weeks ago, called on him to stand down and warned the party to find a new candidate or lose to Trump.

“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,” Clooney wrote in a bruising New York Times opinion piece.

“He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

Then came reports, via political website Axios, that Democratic US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had privately signalled to donors that he was open to a candidate other than Biden, forcing him to issue a statement reiterating his support for the president.

President Joe Biden delivers a NATO summit welcome speech.Credit: AP

And then late in the evening, Vermont Senator Peter Welch called on Biden to withdraw from the election, becoming the first Senate Democrat to do so. Welch said he is worried because “the stakes could not be higher.”

The signs of instability came as the 81-year-old president sought to assure world leaders at the NATO summit in Washington about the future of the alliance and his own leadership.

After opening the summit with a scripted speech on Tuesday night (Wednesday AEST), Biden attended his first working session with other NATO leaders on Wednesday ahead of a bilateral meeting at the White House with Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer.

But after securing the support of influential Democrats in the US Congress on Tuesday, including the key hispanic and black congressional caucuses, and progressive stalwart, independent senator Bernie Sanders, Biden once again came under scrutiny on Wednesday when Pelosi refused to endorse him as she did in the immediate aftermath of the debate.

Speaking to MSNBC, the former speaker suggested that Biden had not yet made up his mind about running.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” she said. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short.”

Pelosi’s comments were notable because she is a key ally of Biden’s, but also because of the president’s insistence that he was definitely not dropping out of the race.

In a letter to Congressional Democrats this week, for example, he declared that “despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.”

President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address as Vice President Kamala Harris and then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi look on.Credit: AP

But the letter did not address the issue of his cognitive capacity, which has come under intense scrutiny after last month’s debate, where he struggled to string sentences together, forgot key facts and at one point froze mid-answer.

And while the president has spent days being active on the campaign trail, hosting NATO and assuring colleagues he is fine, Clooney’s New York Times opinion piece has once again thrown those claims into doubt.

In the piece, the Ocean’s Eleven star expressed affection for Biden and paid tribute to his political career, which spans over half a century.

“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he wrote, before explicitly warning that Democrats would not only lose the presidency, but could also potentially Congress.

“We are not going to win with this president,” he said.

“Most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks. But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”

Clooney’s essay, titled “I love Joe Biden. But we need a new nominee”, comes after he helped the Democrats raise almost $US30 million for Biden’s campaign during a fundraiser that also included former President Barack Obama, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and actress Julia Roberts.

Republicans seized on the event at the time, after footage appeared to show Obama having to help a disoriented Biden off the stage. The White House, however, described the footage as a “cheap fake,” suggesting it had been selectively edited.

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