A growing list of close allies and former advisers to President Obama are looking to sink President Biden’s re-election bid.
The cascade began with former Obama adviser David Axelrod sounding the alarm following Biden’s dismal debate performance last month, and was followed by a group of former advisers known as the “Obama bros” during their time working at the White House, as well as actor George Clooney, who is close to the former president.
“Obama bro” Jon Favreau broke his silence concerning Biden’s mental fitness on Wednesday, just hours after the damaging op-ed by Clooney published in The New York Times calling on the president to quit the 2024 race.
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Former Obama adviser Jon Favreau, President Biden and actor George Clooney (Getty Images)
“It was not surprising to any of us who were at the fundraiser. I was there. Clooney was exactly right, and every single person I talked to at the fundraiser thought the same thing, except for the people working for Joe Biden, or at least they didn’t say that,” Jon Favreau said during an appearance on CNN, referencing a June fundraiser he attended in Los Angeles along with Clooney and Obama.
“I remember my wife, Emily, turned to me after the fundraiser and said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, there is a debate in a week. Either he’ll do well in the debate, and we’ll think he was just tired because he flew all the way back from Europe, and that’ll be that, or he’ll be like this at the debate and then the whole country will be talking about it. So, here we are.”
Clooney wrote that Democratic Party leaders needed to stop trying to convince Americans they “didn’t see what we just saw,” and accused them of ignoring “warning signs” concerning Biden.
The actor claimed the Biden that showed up at the fundraiser was “not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
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Former President Barack Obama (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Favreau, on Tuesday, joined his fellow “Obama bros” Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett in dedicating the majority of their latest “Pod Save America” episode to ganging up on Biden following his poor performance in the first presidential debate, and in a subsequent interview.
“I thought it was bad, and, at times, very hard to watch,” Vietor said, referencing Biden’s sit-down interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last week that came as part of an effort by the president to quell critics calling for him to exit the presidential race.
“In fairness to Biden, I don’t think that interview could have solved the political problem that stemmed from the debate,” he said, adding the interview made him “more concerned” because Biden “struggled to speak in a clear, coherent way.”
Vietor argued Biden didn’t articulate a compelling second-term agenda that would sway swing voters to support him over former President Trump, and that his explanations for his recent poor performance, such as travel and sickness, didn’t fully answer for “how bad the debate was.”
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Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor at Politicon at Pasadena Convention Center on July 29, 2017, in California. (John Sciulli/Getty Images for Politicon)
Lovett agreed and said the interview “was a hard setting for him to succeed, even at his absolute best, because it’s hard to justify why it was more than a week after the debate, that it was so brief, and he was only doing one.”
“The debate was just a bad night. We all saw it,” he said. “The explanations are kind of vague… That doesn’t do enough to assuage our concerns about what we saw that night. Right? So, the explanations don’t offer anything.”
“If you’re going to raise the stakes on one interview, it can’t be another example of you being hard to understand, not because he’s soft, not because he’s mumbling, but because his train of thought doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The stakes are incredibly high. Trump is an incredible threat, but either he will prosecute that case, or someone else will, and right now, we get neither.”
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Favreau said that although Biden’s interview was “more coherent than the debate,” he was “worried” Biden’s lack of urgency and message meant he might not be able to make up for the debate going forward. He cited recent polling showing Biden trailing Trump in every key swing state.
“What are you going to do to win over voters who are undecided between Biden and Trump when you have that message with George Stephanopoulos?” he asked.
Vietor later said it “seems like a clear-cut choice that we’d have a better chance with someone else,” while Lovett argued Biden wasn’t “delivering the message effectively.”
“That George Stephanopoulos interview was painful to watch,” Lovett said. “It was a terrible interview. He did a terrible job articulating why he’s in the race, what happened at the debate, and why he’s the person to beat Trump. He’s doing a terrible job.”
Obama, despite initially defending Biden immediately following the debate, has stayed publicly silent on the increasing criticism.
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