Biden pushed back hard against pressure to drop off the Presidential ticket at the start of the week but his comments at the NATO Summit didn’t exactly put to rest questions about his health.
Now there is fresh pressure and his betting odds have against slipped, with PredictIt pegging him at less than 50/50 to win the nomination.
The catalysts appear to be from two sources:
1) Nancy Pelosi
The former Speaker of the House didn’t exactly give an endorsement of Biden today.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all
encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short,”
Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC.
Asked if she wants him to run, Pelosi said, “I want him to do whatever
he decides to do, and that’s — that’s the way it is. Whatever he
decides, we go with.”
Those are carefully-chosen comments that likely highlight unease (or something worse) under the surface. Pelosi has played the game for a long time and may know which way the wind is blowing.
2) George Clooney
The Hollywood start and long-time Democratic fundraiser was less diplomatic. He published an op-ed in the New York Times and said:
It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser 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.
The rest of it isn’t pretty. If Biden has lost Hollywood, does he really have a chance?
“We are not going to win in November with this president,” Clooney writes.
It’s tough to say what’s behind the latest market moves but a Republican sweep would certainly be good for corporate tax cuts. But if Biden were to drop out, a more-viable candidate could be found. Or maybe there would be a civil war that fractures Democrats even further?
Predicting politics has never been easy and that’s certainly the case at the moment. Some are suggesting the best time for Biden to drop out would be just before the Republican National Convention July 15-18 in order to steal the headlines.
As for his schedule, the President hosts a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom today at 5:30 pm and will host a NATO dinner later.
This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com.
