George Clooney Vows to Keep Quiet About Politics 10/3/05

Ocean's Twelve star George Clooney is urging his fellow Hollywood stars to keep quiet when it comes to politics, because he fears celebrity endorsements could wreck their favorite candidates' chances of victory.

Democrat Clooney and a number of screen stars have recently come under attack for voicing their political views.

And the actor, whose father Nick Clooney was recently defeated in his bid to be elected the congressional representative for Kentucky, has now vowed to be a lot more politically low-key.

He says, "My father ran for congress last year (04). I couldn't campaign for him and I knew I couldn't, because I'd hurt him. They tried to get me to get on the John Kerry train and I said, 'We'll hurt him. They'll use us as 'liberal'.'

"Now, I would argue that (throughout) American history, it's pretty hard to find a time when liberals were on the wrong side of an issue. We thought that the conservative view was, 'Witches should be burned at the stake.' Moderate view was: 'Well, just in case,' and the liberal view was, 'There's no such thing as witches.'

"We thought women should be able to vote and blacks should be allowed to sit at the front of the bus and Vietnam was wrong. We haven't really been on a lot of wrong sides for us to be sort of used as this bad word.

"But we hurt candidates right now, so we can do fundraisers quietly and make some money. But I think it's dangerous to get up and talk about it."