Touch of Joe

Joe Biden's old-school ways of campaigning finally caught up with him in this new age.  Former Nevada assemblywoman Lucy Flores came forward and accused him of having hugged her from behind an kissing her on the head while they were backstage at a 2014 campaign rally when she was a candidate for lieutenant governor of Nevada.  (She lost the election.)

Until now, Biden's only scandal was using the words of another politician back in the 1988 presidential campaign to describe his humble beginnings (though, to be fair, he and former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, that other politician, had similar backgrounds), which led to revelations that Biden plagiarized someone else's work for a college paper.  Now Biden faces a scandal over how he acts with women not his wife in the glare of the Me Too movement.  And for getting minimally physical with a woman in the heat of the excitement of a campaign rally.  Oh yeah, three women have made similar accusations. 

Biden's potential rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination (he's not a presidential candidate yet) all say that believe Lucy Flores, and Biden himself moved swiftly to control the damage.  He acknowledged the incident, he said it was never his intent to make Flores feel uncomfortable, and he says he's willing to listen to her concerns.  Not . . . good . . . enough.  Biden also apologized in an impromptu Twitter video, but more recently, he's been trying to laugh it off, though not too many people are laughing with him. Biden is about to learn what Gary Hart - who, ironically, was forced out of the 1988 presidential campaign over a sex scandal just as Biden was forced out of that same campaign over plagiarism - learned back in the spring of 1987.  He doesn't get the last word on this, and he doesn't get to move on until everyone else lets him, and by then, moving on to a withdrawal may be his only recourse.  Lucy Flores - who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and was at a Beto O'Rourke rally recently - still thinks this disqualifies Biden for the Presidency, and she's gone back to how he ran the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991 as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and botched the handling of Anita Hill's testimony over sexual harassment on Thomas' part. 

The thing is, Biden's transgression is hardly worthy of the term.  He didn't have an affair.  He didn't assault anyone.  He crossed the line, yes, but he did so thinking it was just innocent physical contact.  He's had physical contact with women before, yes, but he's also been touchy-feely with men, too.  That's the sort of fellow Biden is; he likes to literally press the flesh with everyone, getting close to people and connecting with people, because he lives people and he loves politics.   He has a penchant for glad-handling everyone just like the uncle he is.  (I'm not talking about literal nephews and nieces, though I assume he has some; I mean he's the uncle of the Democratic Party.)  He's not unlike the late actor Telly Savalas, who'd always glad-handle friends and fans and tell them he lucky they were to get "a touch of Telly."  And by all accounts, he was a great guy to hang around with.  So, it seems, is Biden.

 And Anita Hill?  Biden was completely foolish to cross-examine her as if Thomas were the victim, which was exactly the wrong strategy, but his bigger problem was reining in his fellow senators with their over-the-top grilling of Professor Hill  - including Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, who voted for Thomas and later regretted it, saying he realized Professor Hill had been telling the truth all along - and, I swear, Biden almost came to blows with Utah's Orrin Hatch.

Biden voted against Thomas in the end.  He believed Anita Hill after cross-examining her.  And he went on to become a major proponent of women's issues.  That part is left unmentioned.

What should not be left unmentioned is that any remedy to Biden's latest incident should be the equivalent of a slap on the wrist, not internal exile, as happened to Al Franken.  Because any punishment for sexual harassment or unwanted physical contact should only be out of proportion only when the act is also out of proportion.

Which begs the obvious question - why are we talking about minor physical contact ending a political career while Clarence Thomas - who reaffirmed recently that he's not retiring - is still on the Supreme Court?      

Ford Tempo

Here's how the issue of Christine Blasey Ford's attempt to testify against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh  stand at this point.  After Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley set an arbitrary deadline for Mrs. Ford to agree to a time to testify and she and her attorney held out for demands to benefit her ability to present her case, the chairman kept setting the deadline further back.  And further back,.  And further back.  And so on and so on, until Mrs. Ford finally agreed to testify, and now she and her attorney are in the process of negotiating the particulars. 

What caused Grassley to be more accommodating? Probably Donald Trump's tweet in which he wanted to know why the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which would investigate Mrs. Ford's claims of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, didn't hear from the accuser in the early 1980s, when the assault was supposed to have taken place.  Once reminded that the FBI doesn't involve itself in sexual-assault cases involving people who have not been appointed to the judiciary due to the fact that they are teenagers, Trump then asked in a follow-up tweet why she and her "loving parents"  (his words) didn't report the assault to local authorities in Maryland, where Kavanaugh and Mrs. Ford lived.  Well - thousands if not millions have people who had been sexually assaulted took to Twitter to explain why they never reported cases of assault - because they involved family members, a star student, an employer . . . and fear of retribution was a common factor in all of these cases.  They feared not being believed or having the blame deflected to them if they were believed.

Nevertheless, the Senate Republican caucus seems hell-bent on getting Kavanaugh confirmed, and with a couple of renegade Democrats, they're likely to pull it off.  But Christine Blasey Ford can still pursue a case against Kavanaugh even if he makes it onto the Court, and what might ultimately happen is that Democrats can "Fortas" him.  I refer to what happened to former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. who in 1969 was shown to have accepted a $20,000 retainer and was believed to have entered into a tax evasion scheme with other judges.  Fortas resigned from the Court under pressure, rather than face lengthy impeachment proceedings, to save his family grief.  If Kavanaugh is confirmed and the charges against him don't go way, he could be forced off the Court like Fortas was, resigning to spare his wife and daughters further grief.

But then he'll have more time to devote to charity.

I've been led to understand that the Senate Judiciary Committee didn't do a good job the last time it looked into a sex scandal, when many of its members didn't take seriously Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas in 1991.  The full Senate did a better job of that. Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52-48 - the highest negative vote ever received by a confirmed Supreme Court justice.