Joe Biden comes face-to-face with a changing culture by lisabelkin
At the start of our societal reckoning over the bad behavior of men, the red lines were clear. The bad guys were easy to identify, the toxic behavior obvious. The question was never whether Harvey Weinstein’s actions were wrong, but why people who might have stopped him did nothing.
“It was demeaning and disrespectful,” said Flores of the time in 2014 when, she says, Biden put his hands on her shoulders, “inhaled my hair” and “plant[ed] a big slow kiss on the back of my head.” The stories of Biden being Biden go back years. In 2014 NPR referred to his “trademark embraces” when describing how he enthusiastically kissed and hugged a 102-year old woman who had come to see him during a visit to a job-training program. After a kiss that barely missed her mouth he said “I need a hug,” and leaned on in for one, wrote reporter Tamara Keith.
And in an essay on Medium, Stephanie Carter, the wife of former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, defended Biden against commenters who called a photo of Biden with his hands on her shoulders during her husband’s swearing in “creepy.” And that – the passage of time, the fact that this is a new moment – is far more likely the take-away of this current Biden brouhaha.
Still, even if Biden can and does change, the allegations themselves contain a reminder to voters that at this stage of the reckoning — the part near the end where hairs are being split as well as sniffed — the way to end the chapter might be to simply move on to leaders who did not appear as characters in that chapter at all. In fact, that seems to be much of the point of bringing this up now.
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