Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden have Democrats once again grappling with the dilemma of believing all women or standing by their man, just as they did two decades ago when Bill Clinton prowled the West Wing.
Biden has denied the charges, and many Democrats say they believe him. “I have complete respect for the whole #MeToo movement,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a typical statement. “There’s also due process and the fact that Joe Biden is Joe Biden.”
That’s the line elected Democrats have been sticking to, though some liberals have begun arguing that the former vice president should be supported over President Trump even if Reade’s allegations are true.
“I’ll take one for the team. I believe Ms. Reade, and I’ll vote for Mr. Biden this fall,” Linda Hirshman, author of Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment, wrote in the New York Times. Trump, she added, is the “worst president in the history of the republic. Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do, the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it.”
A Monmouth University poll found that nearly a third of those who believe Reade, 32%, still support Biden.
This appears to be a shift from the recent #MeToo-era liberal reappraisal of their defenses of Clinton, including one offered by one of the women’s movement’s foremost icons.
In 1998, Gloria Steinem, also writing in the New York Times, argued that Clinton should be supported even if the accusations against him were true. “If all the sexual allegations now swirling around the White House turn out to be true, President Clinton may be a candidate for sex addiction therapy,” she wrote. “But feminists will still have been right to resist pressure by the right wing and the media to call for his resignation or impeachment.”
By 2017, the height of #MeToo, that was no longer in vogue. “The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton,” wrote the Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan. That year, Democrats forced out one of their own, Sen. Al Franken, over sexual misconduct allegations while still in his prime. They believed it gave them the moral high ground when they backed accuser Christine Blasey Ford during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination fight.
Some Democrats later regretted this, believing Franken was railroaded and questioning why Trump was able to survive similar allegations. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was hurt in her presidential campaign by her role in ousting Franken.
Biden has been in the public eye for 50 years without similar accusations, though he has been criticized for being inappropriately tactile with women. He served two terms as vice president under former President Barack Obama, who remains deeply admired by the party’s rank and file. Former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod emphasized that Biden was carefully vetted. “Had any credible issue been raised, you can be sure Biden would not have been the nominee,” Axelrod wrote. “Obama would not have tolerated it, even if he and Biden were close then, which they were not.”
“I’d say that the response to the Tara Reade allegations are part of a process that Democrats have been undergoing for a couple of years in how they evaluate #MeToo allegations,” said Democratic strategist Jessica Tarlov.
“What started, for many, but not all, in the vein of believe all women has shifted to, believe women with investigation, which is the right place to be,” she said. “This does not mean that there is hypocrisy over Kavanaugh: Democrats were demanding a proper FBI investigation and to hear from key figures like Mark Judge. We were denied that. But the implications of allegations against a beloved Democratic figure like Joe Biden has certainly pushed for some reevaluation as well as more of a utilitarian process in political decision making. As Linda Hirshman argued in her NYT piece, there is space to believe Tara Reade and vote for Biden anyway, and I believe many women will be in the same boat come November 2020.”
Some Democrats believe the issue will not be too relevant on Election Day. “The situation could change over the next six months, but in the middle of the pandemic, Biden leads because the election is a referendum on the president’s mishandling of the pandemic,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “Reade’s accusations are serious, but millions of Americans have bigger fish to fry in the midst of the medical and economic devastation caused by the coronavirus outbreak.”
