Joe Biden is one of the few Democratic Party figures formidable enough to draw nuclear opposition before he even gets into the race. If the colonial soldiers at Bunker Hill were told not to fire until they saw the whites of the enemy soldiers’ eyes, the approach to Biden is the opposite: If you can see the whites of his eyes you’ve waited too long.

It’s a strategy of deterrence. This cycle’s version of it came when Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state assemblywoman, accused the former vice president of touching her shoulders and kissing the back of her head, uninvited, at a 2014 campaign event. “I had never experienced anything so blatantly inappropriate and unnerving before,” Flores, a former board member of the Bernie Sanders-aligned group Our Revolution, wrote on March 29 in the Cut. Biden has a history of public touchy-feely moments, and Flores’ account, as well as the inappropriateness of it, rings consistent. That meant it was only a matter of time before others stepped forward. Sure enough, on March 31 Amy Lappos posted on a Connecticut politics Facebook page that Biden rubbed noses with her unbidden at a 2009 Greenwich fundraiser. She told the Hartford Courant, “It wasn’t sexual, but he did grab me by the head.”