Joe Biden released a video yesterday (see "Joe Biden, in Video, Says He Will Be ‘More Mindful’ of Personal Space" by Sydney Ember and Jonathan Martin) where he says, by way of summing up the nearly one-week's-worth of stories of women coming forward saying that the former vice president touched or kissed them inappropriately, that “Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset and I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying.”
Having read most of Sydney Ember's reporting on Biden's #MeToo dust-up, I'm inclined to accept Uncle Joe's assessment. We gone from revelations of predatory, quid-pro-quo sexual behavior, not to mention allegations of rape, by Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein, which kicked off #MeToo less than two-years ago, to complaints, in Joe Biden's case, about hands on shoulders and kisses on the top of the head.
The #MeToo goalposts have moved and moved quickly.
Women have yet to come forward and accuse Biden of sexual assault. Trump has faced numerous credible accusations of sexual assault; he even gloated about it on camera.
The manhandling politician probably goes back to the founding of the republic. What's changed, and changed in the last two years, is that women -- not all women, but a lot -- don't want intimate physical contact as part of the price of being in public.
My sense is that this will blow over, as did the Bernie Sanders #MeToo specter that Sydney Ember attempted to conjure up, and Joe Biden will enter the race in a formidable manner.
What's interesting is that there is so much institutional opposition to Biden's candidacy. Biden seems to me the only candidate who can take on Bernie at this point. And if we accept as fact that the Democratic Party wants to block a Sanders nomination at all costs, I don't know why there is so much boosterism in the mainstream media for Beto, Buttigieg and Harris.
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