Biden’s candidacy faces new dangers after Pelosi and Clooney remarks

President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign ran into fresh trouble on Wednesday when House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi said only that “It is up to the president to decide”If she remains in the race, celebrity donor George Clooney said she should drop out, and Democratic senators and lawmakers expressed new fears on the president’s ability to defeat Republican Donald Trump.

In the evening, Sen. Peter Welch urged Biden to withdraw from the race, becoming the first House Democrat to do so. Welch said he is concerned about the race because “the stakes could not be higher.”

The sudden flood of gloomy statementsdespite Biden’s steadfast insistence that he will not drop out of the 2024 race, has underscored the extent to which the issue remains unresolved among prominent Democratic figures. On Capitol Hill, an eighth House Democrat, Pat Ryan, publicly called on Biden to step aside.

“I want him to do what he decides to do,” Pelosi said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” rather than declaring that Biden should stay. Though the president has repeatedly said he has made his decision, she said, “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running out.”

In an op-ed published Wednesday night in the Washington Post, Welch said, “We can’t look away from President Biden’s disastrous debate performance.”

The first-term senator said it is “with sadness” that he is asking Biden to step down.

It’s a pivotal moment for the president and his party as Democrats consider the once-unthinkable: Biden stepping aside just weeks before the Democratic National Convention, where he is expected to be nominated as their candidate for reelection.

Biden is hosting several foreign leaders in Washington this week on the occasion of NATO summitwith a packed schedule of formal meetings, sideline conversations and long diplomatic dinners at which he flexes his muscles. With his party at a crossroads, the president faces his next public test at the national level on Thursday at a scheduled news conference, which many congressional Democrats will be watching closely to assess his performance.

Biden undoubtedly maintains strong support from key sectors of his coalition, particularly the Black Caucus on Capitol Hill, whose leadership was instrumental in leading the president to victory in 2020 and who are backing him for 2024, considering him the best option to defeat Trump again.

“There’s too much at stake right now and we have to focus,” Rep. Ilhan Omar told The Associated Press on Tuesday, saying Democrats are “losing ground” the more time they spend trying to sort out disagreements over Biden’s nomination. “Democracy is at stake. Everything we value as Democrats, as a country, is at stake, and we have to stop being distracted.”

Pelosi has been widely watched by those looking to her stance as an indicator of how key figures in the Democratic Party think about Biden’s troubled candidacy, and the party leadership sees her comments as important as members weigh possible alternatives in the campaign against Trump.

Because of her powerful position as former House Speaker and her closeness to Biden as a trusted ally of his generation, Pelosi is seen as one of the few Democratic leaders who could influence the president’s stance.

The absence of a full statement from Pelosi endorsing Biden’s campaign is what lawmakers will likely hear most clearly, though she later told ABC that she thinks he can win. She made her remarks as actor Clooney, who had just hosted a glitzy Hollywood fundraiser for the president last month, said in an op-ed in the New York Times that the Biden he saw three weeks ago was not the same Joe Biden from 2020. “He was the same man we all saw at the debate.”

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet spoke forcefully late Tuesday about the danger of a second Trump presidency, saying it was up to the president to “weigh” the options.

Stopping short of calling on Biden to drop out of the race, Bennet said on what he had told his fellow Democrats privately: he believes Trump “is on track to win this election, and he could win it in a landslide and take the Senate and the House of Representatives with him.”

Bennet said: “It’s not a question of politics. It’s a moral question about the future of our country.”

Another Democrat, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, said Wednesday he was “deeply concerned” that Biden could win the election, which he called existential for the country.

“We need to come to a conclusion as soon as possible,” Blumenthal said on .

And Senator Tim Kaine told reporters: “I have every confidence that Joe Biden will do the patriotic thing for the country. And he’s going to make that decision.”

Democrats have been left scrambling over whether to continue to back Biden after his poor performance in the June 27 presidential debate against Trump and his campaign’s lackluster response to their pleas for Biden, at 81, to prove to voters he is physically capable of serving four more years.

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