Oscar-winning actor George Clooney said he regrets that Democrats tapped then-Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s standard-bearer after President Joe Biden ended his bid for a second term in July 2024.
In an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning,” the “Syriana” and “O Brother Where Art Thou?” star stood by his blistering New York Times op-ed in which he stated bluntly that Biden could not defeat former President Donald Trump due to Biden’s cognitive decline.
“I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary,” the 64-year-old said. “Let’s battle-test this quickly and get it up and going.”
“I think the mistake with it being Kamala is that she had to run against her own record,” Clooney went on. “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.”
Following Biden’s fumbling June 27, 2024, debate performance against Trump, Clooney acknowledged in his Times piece that the 46th president exhibited the same feebleness at a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser that the actor had co-hosted days earlier.
In their best-selling book “Original Sin,” co-authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson reported that Biden didn’t recognize Clooney at the fundraiser, despite the two having been friendly for more than two decades.
In the Times op-ed, the actor urged Democrats to hold a mini-primary ahead of the party’s August national convention, to include Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, among others.
Instead, Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris almost immediately, ending any hope of an open competition.
Reflecting on the events of last summer and their effect on the Democratic Party, the “Batman & Robin” star told CBS: “We are where we are.”
“We were gonna lose more House seats, they say [if Biden had stayed in]. So I don’t know. To not do it [the op-ed] would be to say, ‘I’m not gonna tell the truth.’”
However, Clooney added that Biden should be praised for the “selfless act” of doing “the hardest thing to do.”
“It’s very hard to let go of power,” he said. “We know that; we’ve seen it all around the world — and for someone to say, ‘I think there’s a better way forward,’ all the credit goes to him, and that’s really the truth.”
Over the summer, the A-lister was criticized by former first son Hunter Biden during a foul-mouthed podcast interview.
“F—k him and everybody around him, I don’t have to be f—king nice,” Hunter fumed in an interview with YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan.
“Number one, I agree with [director] Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney is not a f—king actor … he is a brand,” Hunter continued. “He’s great friends with [former President] Barack Obama. F—k you. What do you have to do with f—king anything? Why do I have to f—king listen to you?”
