Rosie O'Donnell says Joe Biden should drop out of race for president: 'He's not the future of the Democratic Party'
Rosie O’Donnell is calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the 2020 race for president.
During a Tuesday appearance on CNN’s Cuomo Primetime, the comedian and TV personality cited the 76-year-old former vice president’s age and ideas as the reasons she’ll be backing someone else seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination.
“I think that Joe Biden should say, ‘I’m gonna to sit this one out,’” O’Donnell said. “‘I’m gonna be an elder statesman, and I’m gonna advise.’ And then whoever is the nominee, I think, should think about how to best use somebody with the experience that Joe Biden has [gained] in all these years of politics. But he’s not the future of the Democratic Party.”
O’Donnell’s preferred candidates are Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who she’s supported in the past, and California Sen. Kamala Harris.
Cuomo pointed out that the latest CNN poll showed that Biden is the candidate with the best chance at defeating the Republican Party’s candidate, President Donald Trump. How, he asked, could someone argue that Biden isn’t in the party’s future?
“Well, because he’s antiquated in a lot of his thinking, a lot of his beliefs,” O’Donnell said of Biden.
Biden, who took office as a U.S. senator from Delaware in 1973, has been criticized for some of the decisions he’s made in his lengthy political career. Most recently, Harris and Biden sparred at an early Democratic debate over his opposition to federally mandated busing programs in an effort to integrate schools back in the ’70s.
A Biden spokesperson told the New York Times last month that the candidate always wanted to integrate schools. However, he didn’t think busing was “the right mechanism to achieve it, and thought it placed an undue burden on the African-American families.”
O’Donnell said she didn’t trust the poll numbers. In her opinion, she said, Biden’s “time has passed” as far as being president.
For comparison, Warren is 70; Harris is 54; and Trump is 73.
O’Donnell also said Democratic House majority leader Nancy Pelosi should impeach Trump, although the speaker has said she would rather see Trump lose an election.
“Because this is not the way to deal with Trump, as someone who had to deal with him for a decade before he became President of the United States, relentless, unending abuse from him,” said O’Donnell, who publicly feuded with Trump for years before he moved into the White House.
“This is not how you deal with him. You don’t let him go and give him a long lead,” she said. “You gotta reel him back in and confront him at his own level. To turn around and say we’re not going to have an impeachment inquiry, I think is a gross injustice, and I think Nancy Pelosi is making a huge mistake.”
O’Donnell was on the show to promote Lights for Liberty, the hundreds of vigils that will be held around the country Friday to protest the treatment of immigrants at the United States border.
— ROSIE (@Rosie) July 10, 2019
“This has to be the issue of the election,” the former daytime talk show host said. “I think it’s gonna be, because mothers and fathers across the country are gonna say, ‘Enough. I can’t and will not tolerate this on my watch.’”
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