jacobin | When it first became clear that Joe Biden was launching a 2020
campaign for president, a lot of us were amazed that centrist Democrats
would, in the #MeToo era, be stupid enough to back his candidacy. But we
shouldn’t have been surprised: their feminism is fleeting and
opportunistic.
This week, Tara Reade, a former Biden aide, detailed her 1993 experience of sexual assault
on “The Katie Halper Show” after trying for years to get someone to
listen. Reade has, predictably, been smeared as a Russian agent, because
that’s how mainstream Democrats respond to anything they don’t want to
hear. But she’s just one of seven women who have accused Biden of
horrible behavior, charges that have been public for years.
Democratic elites have known for years about Biden’s shabby, boorish treatment of Anita Hill,
the dignified law professor who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual
harassment in 1991. Hill brought workplace sexual harassment into the
public eye years before #MeToo. Biden was chair of the Senate Judiciary
Committee at the time. He has since said that he “wished he could have
done something” to ensure that her claims got a fair hearing, a pretty
inept apology considering he was in charge of the proceedings.
From mainstream feminists, we’re hearing little about Biden’s #MeToo
problems. In fact, some have flatly declined to be involved. As the Intercept reported
this week, the feminist legal group Time’s Up had refused to take
Reade’s case. In a twist, Anita Dunn, a top Biden adviser, is managing
director of Time’s Up’s PR firm, SKDKnickerbocker. In another twist,
Dunn also advised big Democratic donor (now convicted rapist) Harvey
Weinstein on how to handle his own rape allegations. Another partner in
SKDKnickerbocker, Hilary Rosen, has also been advising Biden’s
presidential campaign.
The allegations aren’t getting much play in the mainstream
media either. Sure, it’s a busy news cycle. And everything about Biden
is boring, even his sexual assault allegations. But the day Reade’s
charges went public, CNN ran an “analysis” by Chris Cillizza about Biden and gender. Its theme? “The Top 10 Women Joe Biden Might Pick as VP.”
By contrast, we’ve heard for years from these same quarters about the
supposed mean, sexist tweets of the Bernie Bros, and about Bernie
Sanders’s alleged tone-deafness on gender issues. But Sanders is the
only candidate now running for president with no sexual assault or
harassment charges against him. That’s obviously a low bar, and it’s
unfortunate we have to mention it. But, perhaps relatedly, Sanders is
also the only one in the race who has always been pro-choice,
has always been committed to full abortion access regardless of income,
and has been fighting for universal childcare for decades, as well as
for advancements that benefit working-class women
even more than men, like the $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All. Yet
if you relied on the mainstream media for information, you’d assume
that Biden was the feminist candidate in the primary, while Sanders was “problematic” for women.
0 comments:
Post a Comment