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- Obama may be quietly backing efforts for Biden to step aside, according to reports.
- Biden's poor debate performance has led to increased calls for him to drop out.
- A number of people in Obama's circle, including his former aides and George Clooney, have criticized Biden.
Former president Barack Obama may be quietly supporting — or at least not objecting to — the Democratic push to oust Joe Biden, according to multiple reports.
On the Thursday morning broadcast of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" — a personal favorite show of Biden's — host Joe Scarborough said that the Biden team believes Obama is supporting the Democratic revolt against Biden's reelection campaign.
"What's going on behind the scenes is the Biden campaign and many Democratic officials do believe that Barack Obama is quietly working behind the scenes to orchestrate this," Scarborough said on "Morning Joe," according to The Hill.
Scarborough's co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski, chimed in, "I think Barack Obama has a lot of influence and there's a lot there."
Ever since Biden's disastrous debate performance — where he struggled to formulate his thoughts, repeatedly trailed off mid-sentence, and appeared confused at times — there have been growing calls from top Democrats for him to drop out of the race.
And major Democratic donor and Hollywood actor George Clooney joined that cacophony of doubt on Wednesday, publishing an op-ed in The New York Times in which he urged Biden to step aside.
Obama — who is close friends with Clooney — reportedly knew ahead of time what Clooney intended to write in his op-ed, sources familiar with the matter told Politico.
Though Politico wrote that Obama didn't orchestrate the op-ed, the outlet said the former president — whom Biden served under as vice president — didn't object to it.
Clooney wrote in his op-ed that he became concerned about Biden's condition weeks before the debate at a Democratic fundraiser in LA that Obama also attended.
"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 in the Times. "He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate."
Obama may have noticed the same vulnerabilities in Biden that Clooney identified that night.
For example, when Jimmy Kimmel was interviewing Biden and Obama onstage at the June event, Biden struggled to keep up with the pace of questions, and Obama was left to pick up his slack, tying together loose ends in Biden's responses, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Others in Obama's circle have been questioning Biden's ability to win and serve a second term. A number of Obama's former aides have also joined the chorus of doubts about Biden's reelection chances this November.
David Axelrod, a former advisor to Obama, said earlier this week that Biden is "dangerously out of touch" and is "not winning this race" against Trump. And the hosts of the "Pod Save America" podcast, also former Obama aides, have said Biden should seriously consider stepping aside.
Biden, however, has fervently and repeatedly argued that he's more than capable of defeating Trump and serving another four years at the top.
"I'm not letting one 90-minute debate wipe out three and a half years of work," Biden posted on X last week. "I'm staying in the race, and I will beat Donald Trump."
Representatives for Obama and the Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.