Congratulations, Democrats. You’re making me defend Joe Biden.
To be clear, the former vice president and all-but-certain presidential candidate’s conduct with women is creepy. He’s one of those old fogies who doesn’t understand how personal space works, and after half a century of fluffy media coverage and royal status in the Democratic Party, he acts like he’s entitled to casually hug, rub, and chin-chuck perfect strangers.
And he’s never been called out on it by anyone on his side of the aisle — until now. In giving him a pass for his public behavior for years, the Left has effectively endorsed it as totally appropriate. So, it’s no wonder Biden would continue invading people’s personal space.
But as the outrage cycle begins to spin around Biden, it’s worth acknowledging the elephant in the room for every case that’s even just #MeToo-adjacent: intention.
Based on everything we know thus far, Biden publicly manhandles women. But there’s no indication that he does anything like this in private, nor that he gets sexual gratification out of it. Getting too close in someone’s hair because you don’t understand boundaries is vastly different than, say, what Al Franken did in groping women during photo-ops.
A primary theme of the past two years of #MeToo revelations has been the role of power in sexual encounters. Folks like Franken clearly did what they did because they thought their celebrity would insulate them from accountability. There’s no real reason to believe that Biden thought he was getting away with anything underhanded when the entire Democratic Party lionized him for years, knowing full well he could get a bit handsy.
None of this is to say that future claims about Biden should be automatically written off, but just as #MeToo requires us to understand the gradient between an unwanted advance and an aggravated assault, it should also demand nuance in intention.
[Read more: Pelosi: Biden needs to understand ‘it isn’t what you intended, it’s how it was received’]
