No decent or empathetic American is enjoying the slow drip of the public and media campaign to persuade President Joe Biden to end his candidacy for a second term. This should apply whether you are a Democrat or Republican, centrist or activist and whatever your position on Biden’s capabilities.
It’s all painful on a human level, not to mention steeped in hypocrisy and lack of accountability. Take Thursday’s news conference, supposed to be the closer of an important NATO summit, but which devolved into millions of Americans tuning in to judge the number and significance of an older man’s gaffes. Not a banner week for Democrats, or democracy.
By now, we all know that many people want Biden not to stand for reelection. Some of those people have great standing in the Democratic Party and worked closely with Biden. Pain is evident in some of their statements.
But we’ve had enough of the growing tide of Opinion pieces saying that Biden should step down. A-list actor George Clooney has the standing of being a big Democratic donor and bundler — a Los Angeles fundraiser also featuring talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel and President Barack Obama that Clooney held last month raised $28 million for Biden’s reelection campaign, a colossal amount. So when, just weeks thereafter, Clooney wrote a Wednesday New York Times piece saying Biden should step down, it got attention.
We don’t doubt Clooney’s sincerity or that what he saw at the fundraiser, co-hosted with Julia Roberts, alarmed him. But we resist the now-pervasive, “if you’ve lost George Clooney …” media narrative; we’re not comfortable with the idea of the fitness for office of the president of the United States being determined by a Hollywood star.
Once Clooney got that level of attention, other politically motivated celebrities such as Ashley Judd also wanted a taste and now are publishing their own Biden-must-go pieces, as if that might change minds; we can imagine a bevy of stars calling up their agents this weekend and asking which publications are the most likely to facilitate their adding their celebrity names to the choir.
Not this one. Stars are voters, and we’re all entitled to articulate our opinions. But this flood not only is self-serving, it’s counterproductive for Democrats.
We’d rather listen to our letters section, made up of regular folks who are looking at this agonizing situation with greater empathy and nuance.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.