George Clooney believes Maryland Governor Wes Moore is a ‘proper leader’ who he sees as the next Democrat standard-bearer after he led the movement to push Joe Biden out in 2024.
The actor, a longtime Democrat supporter and fundraiser, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times July 10 of last year titled ‘I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.’
Clooney, who in June last year raised $30million at a fundraiser for Biden’s 2024 campaign, is largely credited as being the nail in the coffin to Biden dropping his re-election bid.
As part of the promotion for his new Broadway staging of Good Night and Good Luck, CNN asked the Oscar-winner who he thought should lead the Democrats going forward.
‘There’s one person in particular I think is spectacular,’ he said, before singling out Maryland Governor Moore, who he says is ‘levitating above’ the rest.
‘I think he is a guy that handled this tragedy in Baltimore beautifully. He’s two tours of active duty in Afghanistan. He speaks sort of beautifully, he’s smart. He’s a proper leader.’
Clooney is referring to Baltimore’s Key Bridge collapse in early 2024 which killed six maintenance workers.
‘I like him a lot, I think he’s someone we could all fall in behind,’ Clooney added.
He also cited Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear – Clooney is a native of the state – and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as two possible contenders.
‘We have to find somebody rather soon,’ Clooney warned Jake Tapper.
Moore has been seen as a potential standard-bearer, with some even referring to him as the ‘next Obama.’
John Ronquillo, the director of the Institute for Public Leadership and a professor at the University of Maryland, said Moore could be on the same path as Barack Obama – rising rapidly through the political ranks to ascend to the White House.
‘While I want to be careful with comparisons — Barack Obama is Barack Obama and Wes Moore is Wes Moore — there’s no denying that they’ve both had a meteoric ascent to political prominence,’ Ronquillo told The Hill newspaper.
Obama endorsed Moore’s bid for governor and cut a campaign ad for him.
Moore’s ascendency comes as polls show voters are infuriated with the current Democratic leadership. Recent polls from NBC News and CNN showed the party is at its lowest approval rating ever: 27 percent and 29 percent, respectively.
This is Clooney’s first thoughts on the future of the Democrat Party after he pushed its past out the door last year.
Back in early July – just over a month before the 2024 Democratic National Convention – Clooney penned the New York Times op-ed weeks after Biden’s troubling performance in the June Presidential debate.
‘I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,’ Clooney said in the op-ed, just weeks after he hosted a fund-raiser for Biden himself.
‘But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. 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***ng deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,’ Clooney opined.
He also plainly stated, ‘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.’
‘This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly,’ Clooney continued.
The actor thought removing Biden from the ticket would, ‘enliven our party’ and ‘wake up voters’ who had ‘checked out’ even before the debate.
The op-ed was just part of a growing chorus among Democrats for Biden to step down, which he ultimately did just 11 days later on July 21, officially endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his stead.
Clooney was quick to thank Biden for stepping out of the way, likening the move he helped foist on the commander in chief as ‘saving Democracy’ – and said he was excited for Harris and her ‘historic quest’.
He then doubled down on his endorsement of Harris by narrating a campaign advertisement that urged men to consider how voting for Trump would affect the women in their lives.
Clooney reaffirmed that seeing Biden at a Hollywood fundraiser being led off the stage by Barack Obama in June last year triggered him to write the piece.
He said he’d met with Biden and spoke to him for hours just a year before at the Kennedy Center and on that night in Hollywood, he ‘saw someone much less sharp.’
The actor then took a shot at the press, saying: ‘The media, in many ways, dropped the ball.’
Clooney reaffirmed that ‘I’ve always liked Joe Biden and I like him still’ but said that his obvious incapacities made it impossible to defend his record.
‘The Biden administration was terrible at explaining that we’re a world economy, where we were actually doing better than all the other G7 countries.’
‘They were bad at telling the story because their messenger was not working at his best, to say the least,’ Clooney told NYT this week.
