WASHINGTON: The US President Joe Biden must decide quickly whether to stay in the 2024 White House race, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a long-time Biden ally, said on Wednesday while declining to say definitively that she wanted him to run.
In an opinion piece published on Wednesday in the New York Times, Hollywood star George Clooney, a Democrat who co-hosted a fundraiser for Biden last month, withdrew his support.
Pelosi’s remarks, which ignored Biden’s repeated insistence that he remains in the race, suggested he could face a fresh wave of doubts from fellow Democrats.
For nearly two weeks the 81-year-old Biden has sought to stem defections by Democratic lawmakers, donors and other allies worried he might lose the Nov 5 vote to Republican Donald Trump, 78, after Biden’s halting June 27 debate performance.
Pelosi said on MSNBC she was encouraging her colleagues on Capitol Hill with concerns about Biden to refrain from airing them while he hosts NATO leaders in Washington this week.
“I’ve said to everyone: let’s just hold off. Whatever you’re thinking, either tell somebody privately, but you don’t have to put that out on the table until we see how we go this week,” she said, describing Biden’s strong remarks at the NATO summit on Tuesday as “spectacular”. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short.”
In his opinion piece, Clooney wrote: “It’s devastating to say it… He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote. “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.”