Whatever happened with Tara Reade in 1993, Biden is still infinitely better than Trump
Former U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
(AFP via Getty Images)
By ROBIN ABCARIAN COLUMNIST
MAY 2, 2020
3:05 AM
I had supported Elizabeth Warren and would have enthusiastically voted for Bernie Sanders. They have big ideas, passion and an unquestionable commitment to making life better for working people. Biden feels like a page from the past.
But OK.
Democratic voters are angry, exhausted and appalled by the presidency of Donald Trump. As the primaries wore on, they sought refuge in the comfortable, the familiar. They wanted a return to sanity, not a revolution. Like an old slipper, Biden felt just right to a lot of voters.
Unfortunately, the world soon went into shutdown mode, and took the American presidential campaign with it. Biden virtually disappeared from view as the coronavirus turned life upside down, and President Trump turned his daily news briefings into the marathon campaign rallies he craves.
And then Tara Reade stepped forward to claim that Biden sexually assaulted her nearly 30 years ago when she was a low-level staffer in his Senate office, and suddenly Biden was back in the spotlight, though not for reasons any candidate would desire.
On Friday, under pressure from women’s groups, editorial boards and supporters, Biden made his first high-profile TV appearance in what seemed like forever. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he vehemently denied assaulting Reade.
“I am saying unequivocally it never, never happened, and it didn’t,” Biden told co-host Mika Brzezinski. “It never happened.”
Reade has said she filed a contemporaneous complaint with a congressional personnel office about harassment, though it did not mention the alleged assault. Biden has called on the National Archives to examine its files from the period, and to release anything pertaining to her allegation.
If there is a complaint, that’s where it would be,” he said. “That’s where it would be filed.”
Brzezinski also pressed Biden about his personal papers at the University of Delaware, which are sealed until two years after he leaves public life.
Why, she wondered, couldn’t Biden just comb through those records looking for mentions of Reade, who says Biden’s former chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, took notes during a meeting where she complained about Biden making her uncomfortable. (He has said he has no memory of any such meeting.)
Biden seemed befuddled by the question. “Look, I mean, who does that search?” he asked. He expressed concern about confidential conversations with President Obama and world leaders in the files, and said they don’t contain personnel records, reiterating that those would have gone to the National Archives.
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Biden, a U.S. senator for 36 years before becoming Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, does not seem like the kind of man who would pin a young staffer against a cold wall in a Capitol Hill hallway and penetrate her with his fingers. But the MeToo movement has shown, all too depressingly, that the only common denominator among men who harass and abuse women in the workplace is that they crave power.
It’s true that Biden has had trouble keeping his hands to himself, and sort of apologized after he was finally taken to task last year. But every other complainant to date has accused him of being a creepy space invader, not a rapist. Unlike with Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault by at least a dozen women, there’s no pattern here.
Still, I take Reade seriously. I have to. Imagine what a woman has to lose by stepping forward like this. Anita Hill was savaged when she testified that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her when they were teenagers, received death threats.
Over the years, Reade has given various accounts of her alleged assault, and they have changed and become more graphic over time. A year ago, when a handful of women came forward to complain about Biden’s unwanted touching, Reade told the New York Times that he had “publicly stroked her neck, wrapped his fingers in her hair and touched her in ways that made her uncomfortable.” She did not make the more serious assault allegation until this spring.
Still, two of her friends, who have allowed themselves to be identified in news reports, have said Reade told them Biden assaulted her a couple of years after it allegedly occurred. One, Lynda LaCasse, said she nevertheless plans to vote for Biden.
To be a white man in this country
they choose that kind of title tho
