Even the Democrats are finally tired of defending their dirty old men.
In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was having his day in the sun. His affair with the intern was fighting for attention with the groping reported by Kathleen Willey, the rape reported by Juanita Broaddrick, and the pants-down exposure before Paula Jones back in Arkansas.
At that time, a chorus of liberal ladies-in-waiting was there to defend him. This included Gloria “one-free-grope” Steinem, Sheila Jackson Lee, and “Year Of The Woman” graduate Sen. Barbara Boxer, as well as her California colleague Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It also included male counterparts such as author William Styron, who said that fooling around was the mark of the gentleman, and historian Arthur Schlesinger who told us that gentlemen “lied about sex” all the time.
Perhaps the defeat of Al Gore (by a whisker) in the 2000 election was one of the things that had helped make the difference, or the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 by Donald Trump, of all people. His win followed a second debate in which, stung by his own crass remarks caught on tape about groping women, he retaliated by filling the front rows of the hall with Clinton’s accusers. Their grim looks, cast upon the Clintons, took most people’s minds off Trump’s slip. True, Bill Clinton’s survival allowed his wife to run for president twice (and lose twice in the bargain), but this hardly means it was good for his party. Perhaps, had he been impeached and convicted, Al Gore would have slipped into his place without breaking his stride and sailed smoothly into winning the ensuing election. And then, Bill Clinton could never have cleared the field for his wife before the 2016 election, and we would have never have had Trump, either.
In contrast, when the news broke that ex-staffer Tara Reade had accused presumed nominee Joseph Biden of raping her in his Senate office almost three decades earlier, the response of his party was somewhat restrained. The 600 women on his shortlist for vice president dutifully replied that “that’s not the Biden I know,” which was not surprising. After all, he was now close to 80 years old, and in his televised ramblings from his house in Delaware, he seemed to have problems staying awake.
Sympathy may have also accrued from his personal tragedies, but for whatever reason, things weren’t the same. “I believe Tara Reade. I’m voting for Biden anyway,” wrote Linda Hirshman in the New York Times Wednesday. She argued that she was tired of cleaning men’s messes, but was backing Biden now because Trump. Similar pieces came from outposts such as Slate, Vox, and New York magazine, where Rebecca Traister, a faithful Clinton backer, could barely contain her disgust.
Only 86-year-old Feinstein showed the old fight, calling Reade’s charges “ridiculous” and her case “totally different” from the charges made then by Anita Hill in 1991 against Clarence Thomas, and in 2018 against now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “I don’t know this person at all,” Feinstein said. “She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years?”
And where had Ford been before Feinstein found her and used her to serve her own purpose? After 2016, this year has the second presidential race in a row to be marred by charges of abuse and assault on the top of both tickets, if you count Clinton’s continued defense of her husband as part of the problem. Which you really should.
