Biden team resorts to Trump's "Access Hollywood" playbook as Democrats signal looming revolt

If you are busy attacking George Clooney as an out-of-touch Hollywood elite, you are either a bog-standard Republican politician or a Democrat on track to lose the White House. On Wednesday, the actor — who just weeks earlier helped President Joe Biden raise $30 million for his re-election campaign — came out with what he described as “devastating” news: The 81-year-old man who looked confused and sounded incoherent for much of his 90-minute quarrel with Donald Trump last month was the same man — a shell of his former self — that Clooney had encountered at a fundraiser in Hollywood. “He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” Clooney is not the only one to have encountered the debate version of Biden: The president’s unscripted appearances since June 27 — the date his campaign originally said would “reset” the race, reminding Americans that Biden is normal while Trump is nuts — have been only slightly less disastrous. Jet leg: That’s why Biden did so poorly at the debate, came off as disturbingly unfit to a loyalist who helped him raise tens of millions of dollars, and why, presumably, he accidentally told a radio host, in a scripted appearance earlier this month, that he was the “first Black woman to serve with a Black president.” Biden’s inner circle may believe that denial is a winning strategy. In other words, the Biden 2024 campaign strategy currently consists of hoping that the president receives less free media going forward, even as its own coffers deplete because donors — like Clooney, feeling disrespected, their concerns ignored and dismissed as those of “elites,” even as a majority of Democratic voters now want Biden gone — have stopped giving.