This non-engagement is what feels patently bizarre about Biden’s response: It creates the sense that he is about 10 feet away from everything that is actually happening. My colleague Lili Loofbourow has been writing about this peculiar quality of Biden’s, the way in which he just kind of seems above it all, by virtue of not really being all there, maybe, or possibly because his entire political project is aimed at reassuring us that there is some good version of America that it is possible to go back to. It becomes extraordinarily depressing, in this context, that Biden cannot seem to muster a response to these allegations that feels connected, at all, to the record of 1993 or to a path forward in 2020. He seems squarely focused on his history in between those dates—not on what there is still to do on creating a better world when it comes to sexual harassment or assault, or on how he has possibly failed us in the past in this regard, and what his reckoning with it has meant to him.
Perhaps this should not surprise us. This is a man who, earlier in this presidential campaign, was accused of touching women in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, made them even question their own political careers. In response, he delivered a non-apology and later joked about it. This is a man who called Anita Hill to apologize to her only when it would matter to his career, and then didn’t even manage to make the apology, according to Hill. There is no real reason to think he’d be more up to the challenge now, even though the stakes are much higher.
His response simply reinforces that Biden is exactly who you thought he was—a man who has run for president and failed multiple times, yet couldn’t help but try to seize this current moment when the party is looking, above all, for the embodiment of a standard Democrat.
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