George Clooney says replacing Biden with Harris ‘was a mistake’
George Clooney said it was a “mistake” for Kamala Harris to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump in last November’s US presidential election.
But the actor added that he had no regrets about writing an op-ed in The New York Times in July calling for Biden to leave the race.
In the article titled “I like Joe Biden. But we need a new candidate,” Clooney writes that the aging president has won many battles during his career “but the one battle he can’t win is the one against time.”
Clooney’s comments come after the former president’s son, Hunter Biden, criticized him for questioning his father’s mental acuity.
Less than a fortnight after Clooney’s op-ed, Biden announced he would step down for Harris.
In his interview with CBS, the actor said he would write it again, adding, “We had a chance.”
“I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the editorial, a primary. Let’s test this quickly and get it going,” he said.
But there were no Democratic primaries and Biden’s vice president won the nomination, subsequently losing to Trump.
“I think the mistake of her being Kamala is that she had to run against her own record. That’s very difficult to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person.’ That’s hard to do and so she was given a very difficult task,” Clooney said.
“I think it was a mistake, quite honestly.”
In the op-ed, the actor and prominent Democratic fundraiser wrote that it was “devastating to say,” but the Joe Biden he met at a fundraising event three weeks earlier was not the Biden of 2010. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” he added.
“This was the same man that we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney said, referring to Biden’s disastrous televised debate against Trump a few weeks earlier, which fueled new concerns about the 81-year-old’s fitness for office.
In an expletive-filled interview with Andrew Callaghan on the Channel 5 YouTube channel, Hunter Biden accused Clooney of exaggerating the former president’s fragility.
When asked why Clooney interfered in the race, Hunter Biden responded with a succession of profanities toward the actor.
“What do you have to do with… anything?” he said in a message to Clooney. “Why do I have to… listen to you?”
In an interview with the BBC last month, Harris said she might run for the White House again.
In her first interview in the United Kingdom, Harris said she “maybe” would be president one day and that she was confident there would be a woman in the White House in the future.
