Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is in the middle of a political image rehabilitation.
The New York senator, 52, bowed out of the Democratic White House race last August after a brief, five-month-long campaign, failing to meet the polling or fundraising criteria to qualify for the third debate.
After returning to her day job in Congress, the former lawyer and House lawmaker is back in the limelight as she works with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York to bring federal resources to their state, the country’s novel coronavirus epicenter.
Yet Gillibrand has also received attention for her response to denied sexual misconduct accusations made against her former presidential rival, presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
“I stand by Vice President Biden,” she said last week during a conference call with reporters. “He’s devoted his life to supporting women, and he has vehemently denied this allegation.”
And on Thursday, she’ll host a virtual event for Women for Biden as his team looks for ways to reinsert the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator into the national conversation as he struggles to breakthrough wall-to-wall COVID-19 outbreak coverage.
Gillibrand backed Biden after Super Tuesday on March 3, following the Democratic establishment’s move to coalesce around the apparent standard-bearer. Although her endorsement wasn’t unexpected, it’s still an awkward situation given their clashes over his record on women, including when she dredged up an opinion piece he wrote in 1981 against the childcare tax credit on the Detroit debate stage.
It chafes with her own history of advocating for women as well, such as her efforts to stamp out sexual misconduct in the military and as part of the #MeToo movement.
Gillibrand was the first sitting senator to call on then-Democratic colleague Al Franken of Minnesota to resign after sexual misconduct claims were made against him in 2017. That same year, she said former President Bill Clinton should’ve left the White House following the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s. Those decisions hurt her relationships with donors and the Clintons, with whom she was close after replacing Hillary Clinton in the Senate.
She additionally had two staffers in her Senate office who were kept on payroll despite complaints of sexual misconduct. One of the men’s names was first reported by the Washington Examiner.
Gillibrand’s office did not immediately respond to request for comment.
For Rutgers University’s David Greenberg, it’s clear Gillibrand honestly now trusts and supports Biden, distinguishing Tara Reade’s allegations against him to those leveled at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 Senate confirmation hearings, saying, Kavanaugh’s accusers other than Julie Swetnick were more credible.
“She knows she made a bad mistake in leading the push to oust Franken,” he told the Washington Examiner of Gillibrand and the popular senator and Saturday Night Live alum.
“When she ran for president, I recall vividly that there was discussion of her candidacy on my local NPR affiliate,” Greenberg said. “One liberal caller after another, mainly women, criticized her for going after Franken. She advertised on my Facebook page. Under her ad were scores of comments, almost all of which criticized her for sabotaging Franken. She really blew it.”
Democrats should’ve made clear all along that “believe all women” means “take women’s claims seriously and hear them out,” but evaluate them against the available evidence, according to Greenberg.
The professor predicted, however, that Gillibrand had risen as high as she was likely to politically. That being said, the political chameleon, who became less conservative in her stances on policies such as gun control and immigration when she stopped representing an upstate congressional district and started working for New York at-large, has indicated she would accept an administration position if she was offered one.
Despite being “intelligent and competent,” Greenberg described her as “a second-tier senator whom [Sen. Chuck] Schumer plucked from the ranks of the New York House delegation to fill Hillary’s Senate seat.”
“She has been largely AWOL on the coronavirus, and I don’t think she’s destined for senatorial greatness. She’s a reliable Democratic vote and takes the lead on a few issues, but no superstar. Her presidential campaign showed that to be the case,” he said.
Reade, 56, has accused Biden, 77, of forcibly kissing and penetrating her with his fingers, as well as inappropriately touching her hair and neck, when she was a Senate aide to him in 1993. She told confidantes about the incident and allegedly filed a complaint, but never received a copy of it and the document is proving difficult to track down three decades later. Biden, in turn, vehemently denies her claim and says no other staff member was made aware of Reade’s situation.
