It’s a good rule of politics that if they’re laughing at you, you’re losing.
And that’s exactly where President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign found itself on Wednesday over its response to liberal actor George Clooney’s call for Biden to drop out of the race.
The fact that it was commentators on Biden-friendly CNN doing the laughing only made it worse.
Check out the moment on “The Lead with Jake Tapper” here:
Check out the look on Jake Tapper’s face after he’s told that the Biden campaign is suggesting that Joe Biden has more stamina than George Clooney because Clooney left a fundraiser before Biden did. pic.twitter.com/0WlUooT2xl
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 10, 2024
As Fox News reported, CNN White House correspondent Kayla Tausche was reporting on the Biden re-election team’s response to Clooney’s commentary published by The New York Times on Wednesday urging Biden to leave the race.
Clooney was the driving force behind the $30 million fundraiser for Biden in Los Angeles in June — the one where former President Barack Obama had to step in and lead Biden offstage like a child after the 46th president apparently froze.
It was a public precursor to the rambling, evidently unhinged Biden the nation saw in his June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump.
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Biden’s behavior at the fundraiser, Clooney wrote in the Times, convinced him that Biden has no business running for re-election.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal‘ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
But Tausche told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Biden’s re-election team was firing back, implying that Biden is not only chipper — he’s got more on the go than a Hollywood movie star.
“Biden aides point to an aggressive travel schedule in the coming weeks. He’s set to go to Michigan on Friday, Nevada next week, as well as an aggressive fundraising schedule with events planned in Texas and Colorado and two in California as proof that he is not going anywhere,” Tausche said.
“And in response to those comments from George Cooney, Jake, a campaign official who attended that Los Angeles fundraiser tells me that George Clooney left three hours before the president. So, clearly, the gloves are off.”
Tapper didn’t get it.
“What does that mean, George Clooney left three hours earlier?” he asked. “What’s the point?”
“The point of that is to suggest that Biden’s stamina is better than Clooney’s and Clooney didn’t have eyes on the entire event,” Tausche said. “That’s the response to the Clooney op-ed.”
Tausche managed to keep the smile from her lips, barely. Tapper tried, but couldn’t keep a straight face through the exchange. The laughter from his panelists in the background was audible.
Conservative Americans have no reason to appreciate George Clooney’s politics. He’s part of the monied class that brought Biden to the White House in the first place. And it’s not like Biden’s obvious infirmities — mental and physical — weren’t already on display when Clooney and his Hollywood buddies got together to raise $30 million for him in one night.
But the idea that Joe Biden’s team is trying to spin that the addled octogenarian — the guy who falls on stages, falls upstairs and falls off bikes — is somehow physically more fit than a 63-year-old leading man of Hollywood really is laugh-out-loud material.
The fact that this is CNN — a network that rivals progressive MSNBC in its public distaste for Trump — just makes it worse for Biden.
In politics, when they’re laughing at you, you’re losing. And when they’re laughing at a Democratic president on CNN, he might well have already lost.
