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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Does Joe Biden Have a #MeToo Problem?
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Does Joe Biden Have a #MeToo Problem?
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- [00:00]
A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, May 2nd. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Last week, Joe Biden announced that he's running for president in 2020. He was the frontrunner for the nomination before he even made his campaign official. But not every Democrat has welcomed his candidacy. Some think he represents the party of the past, not the future, a concern that was exacerbated in early April when seven women accused him of inappropriate physical contact. He is now facing renewed scrutiny for how he handled Anita Hill's testimony in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1990, when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last Thursday, shortly before entering the presidential race, Biden called Hill to express his regret for what she had endured. She was reportedly left deeply unsatisfied by his apology, prompting Biden to issue a stronger response on the View.
- [02:18]
C
I am sorry she was treated the way she was treated. I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done. I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules to be able to stop things. But look, take a look at what's happened, what I did when we got past, when we got through that God awful experience she'd been through. She's one of the reasons why we have the MeToo movement. She's one of the reasons why I was able to finish writing the Violence Against Women Act.
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B
Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos, both New Yorker staff writers based in Washington, join me to discuss Biden's handling of the Thomas hearings and how the MeToo movement is shaping politics. Jane, welcome. And Evan too. Good to have you both on.
- [03:04]
D
Thanks. Great to be here.
- [03:05]
E
Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
Jane, I want to start with you. In 1994, you and Jill Abramson published a book about the Clarence Thomas confirmation fight. And this week you went back to your notes to write a retrospective piece for newyorker.com about the hearings. What did you find?
- [03:23]
D
Well, I mean, one of the points I wanted to make was the reason Anita Hill was not accepting Joe Biden's apology as having been full enough was that he kept referring to himself as having done all he could under the rules and kind of saying passively, yeah, she wasn't treated well, but not saying that it was he himself, that he was not taking responsibility himself. And if you go back and you look at the record and what I was trying to show was that Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and it was he who set the rules for how she was treated. And so he had a lot to do with what went wrong during those hearings. He certainly wasn't the chief sort of sinner against Anita Hill, but he quite bungled the hearings.
- [04:11]
B
Yeah. In his attempt at bipartisanship, he actually made it possible for this gross display of heavily partisan politics. And, you know, the Republicans were out to destroy Anita Hill's credibility, and they did.
- [04:26]
D
So, I mean, in some ways, the best summary of it came from another senator, Howard Metzenbaum, who was sort of a crusty old liberal at the time. And he just said, you know, Joe bent over backwards so far to please the Republicans that he enabled them to do what they were going to do. No matter what, hell or high water, they were going to put Clarence Thomas on the court. And so as we move forward, the question of whether this matters anymore, this is really ancient history almost as politics goes, it's 28 years ago. But I think the live question that I would bring out of all of it is whether Joe Biden has learned how to sort of see the difference between the old style Democratic politics, which was trying to be fair to everyone, and the new style politics that's conducted particularly by the Republican Party, which is warfare. And they were out to win during those hearings and Biden was out to be fair, and he got slaughtered as a result.
- [05:26]
B
Also, it's worth saying that Biden didn't call Hill to apologize until the day of his campaign announcement, which is a little galling. But I also want to ask you about sort of how the standards of conduct have changed with the advent of MeToo. So pulling someone in for a hug on the campaign trail is different from what say the current occupant of the White House has boasted of doing to young women.
- [05:53]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think there's this huge problem out there right now of sort of category creep between the behavior of somebody like Harvey Weinstein, which we think of as potentially criminal, and then sort of more garden variety just invasion of women's space and kind of being too huggy and handsy or whatever, which a lot of younger women are sort of speaking out, saying they really don't like that. And all kinds of touching, even friendly touching, requires consent. So there's a big blur out there in the political world. And, you know, the lines are very unclear. And Biden was the recipient of some of that criticism for stuff that even his accuser, Lucy Flores, says was not assault, was not sexual harassment, was just sort of the kind of behavior that made her uncomfortable.
- [06:46]
B
Yeah. And Evan, you know, it's interesting to see how much things have changed just in the past couple of years. You profiled Biden for the magazine back in 2014 when he was vice president, and there was speculation at the time about whether he would run for president in 2016. So you saw up close, very close, actually, you yourself, his very sort of schmaltzy political Persona, as Jane's been alluding to. Biden's defenders say the shoulder squeezes, the rubbing of noses are just his style of exuberant connecting with people. I think the New York Times op ed columnist Michelle Goldberg aptly called it avuncular pawing. So what did you see when you were out there with Biden?
- [07:30]
E
Yeah, it's funny, you know, Biden was famous among other politicians for having what John Kerry described to me sort of admiringly, clearly admiringly, as a. He was a. Biden was a very tactile politician is what he said. And Biden brings people in, he hugs them. He does this thing, particularly with men, where he sort of cups the back of your head. You're not quite sure. Where it's all headed. But that was a big part of his Persona, and it fed into this image. And I think what is a deep seated piece of his political life, which is that he is really has this almost desperate appetite for the connect, as political operatives would call it. It's that moment where you make eye contact with the skeptic in the crowd or you have that experience with somebody on the rope line that they're talking about later in the day. And that can be an asset or it can be a liability. For a long time, it's been one of the things that Joe Biden sort of prides himself on. And actually standing next to Barack Obama, there was. There was a logic to it because Obama was the cool side of that. He was a little bit reserved. He. At the end of a day of campaigning, Barack Obama didn't want to talk to anybody else. He wanted to sit in his room and read. And I remember one of Joe Biden's advisors, a guy who'd been with him for decades, telling me that at the end of a long day of campaigning, Biden would be so amped up that he would get into his hotel room and he would watch two movies, three movies, and he still couldn't fall asleep because he was just so kind of wired.
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B
And.
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E
And so, you know, that creates this very much, this two sides of Joe Biden that people are still contending with now.
- [09:11]
B
So, Jane, going back to the Thomas hearings, many, many Democrats were horrified in watching the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings last year at the debasement of Christine Blasey Ford and the weird rage of Kavanaugh and how it all seemed to be. The Anita Hill spectacle seemed to be reenacted all over again.
- [09:35]
D
And that is one of the things that Anita Hill said when she spoke to the New York Times on the day of Biden's announcement. Was that partly what he needs to make an apology for from her standpoint, is not just to her, but really to many other women, and in particular Christine Blasey Ford, for having set the stage for the same sort of process to take place again during the Kavanaugh hearings. And in all those intervening years, there's been a lot of progress for women, but when it comes to confirming a Supreme Court justice in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was, as you say, almost a reenactment. It was this kind of Groundhog Day feeling. The only thing that the Senate Republicans had come up with to make things look a little better was they'd brought in a woman to ask some of the nastier questions of Christine Blasey Ford. But again, it was a single woman's voice up against a very powerful man whose credibility was being questioned just for having tried to speak up when asked by the Senate to do so.
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B
You know, there was also an interesting piece this morning in the Washington Post on the op ed page by Angela Wright, who talked very bluntly about how Thomas played the race card in those hearings, really intimidating the white committee members and, as she put it, effectively turning Biden into a prattling, ineffectual lump of nothingness. Could you talk a little bit about who Angela Wright says?
- [11:06]
D
Angela Wright, Boy, that piece in the Washington Post, I would recommend for people to go check it out, because Angela Wright is the voice that we did not get to hear during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. She was an additional female witness who wanted to testify against Clarence Thomas about her own experience being sexually harassed by him. And Joe Biden, who was at the time the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, got sort of cowed out of calling her. The Republicans told him, your Angela Wright is going to turn out to be Angela Wrong. And they said she was mouthy or whatever. I mean, basically, they intimidated him into not calling her. Instead, she was allowed to put a statement into the record so late that almost nobody saw it. She was spending the hearings in a motel room with her lawyer, expecting to be called and never was. And so finally in the Washington Post, you can read what she sounds like. And she is a really strong voice. And she says in this column, very interestingly, I don't expect or even want or need any kind of apology from Joe Biden. Yes, he did bungle those confirmation hearings. But she says it's the Republicans who really went after Anita Hill, who have an awful lot more to answer for. And finally, in the end, she says, I'll tell you who I do want an apology from. Clarence Thomas. And so you get to see what it might have been like if Angela Wright had testified. I interviewed her for the book, and I thought she was a powerful voice who might very well have made the difference if she'd been able to testify. But, you know, she's saying, you know, when it comes to Joe Biden, yes, he made some mistakes, but this shouldn't be held against him. We need to focus on Trump, who's so much worse.
- [12:55]
B
Yes. And she's pointing out that there are real political dangers here. And I wonder what you think about whether the righteousness of the MeToo movement is in danger of torpedoing popular politicians. I think of Al Franken, who was basically railroaded out of the Senate without being given much of a chance to defend himself at all.
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D
Well, I mean, I think this is a real issue and a real problem is the due process, because what you've got often is sort of trial by Internet in these cases. And it was interesting in the case of Al Franken. He was asking for a hearing in front of thesome kind of investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee. And a lot of senators had said they too, were thought that would be the fair process for him. But as you say, there was this. He was sort of railroaded out. There was, you know, a kind of a growing panic among Democrats that they needed to show that they were more righteous than he was, and they kind of threw him under the bus.
- [13:51]
B
So the party has to sort of come to terms with who they're going to go after and how and when and what constitutes, you know, a real me too incident and what doesn't.
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D
I mean, if anything, I think that some people have written and talked about how if the allegations against a politician like Biden, in the case of, you know, having been sort of overly tactile with these women, that there's a danger that it can trivialize the MeToo movement because there is this category creep. And you sort of. It makes it look like all these cases are minor when some of these cases are really serious and important. And so you see some pushback, actually, from women. Mika Brzezinski spoke up and called the allegations against Biden ridiculous. So there's some infighting within the Democratic Party about how to handle this. Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne Tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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B
So, Evan, back to you. I want to have you talk a little bit about Biden's record. He was a US senator for 36 years. That's a long time. And maybe you could give us a brief overview of his record in Congress. And then as Obama's vice president, there was kind of an interesting shift in the public's perception of him. There were years in there before he became vice president where he was seen as a bit of a blowhard and, you know, prone to gaffes and everything else. But then his image changed. So what was going on there?
- [15:48]
E
Well, as Jane mentioned, I think one of the things about looking at his handling of the Anita Hill hearings is about saying, okay, what is the totality of this guy's experiences? How do you line up the assets and the liabilities over 36 years in the Senate and then eight years in the White House. And that's, I think, clear. That's what the campaign is certainly going to be trying to do over the months ahead. He is proud of the fact that he wrote the Violence Against Women act, which raised penalties for sex offenses and did expand prosecution of domestic violence. That's sort of one of the things that people credit him with having done as a senator. On the liability side of the column, though, his voting record puts him on the what is now the wrong side of the the 1994 crime bill, which put a lot of people in jail who it's now believed should not have been there. He voted for repeal of Glass Steagall, which kind of laid some of the foundation towards the financial crisis. And then he also voted for the Iraq war, but then said later that it was a big mistake and he became a critic of it while he was in the Senate, in the White House, what you see is this interesting transformation where he went from being sort of the guy who Obama's political aides would roll their eyes at. The fact that he would talk too long in meetings. He was undisciplined on the st. They would say, but then he did things at times that would say to them, and they would say, you can't underestimate Joe Biden's political instincts. And there was this one moment in 2012 during the reelection campaign when you remember that Obama had sort of botched his first debate with Mitt Romney. He'd come out in a kind of relaxed way, and he just ended up not looking forceful enough. And so then they had the debate coming up between Biden and Paul Ryan, and Biden came out in a kind of slugger mode, and it actually did stem the damage. I think as you sit back and look at what he's done over the last half a century in Washington, one of the things that is worth remembering is that he's a pretty durable politician who has these instincts, and that may serve him well when he's up against people who have a lot less experience.
- [17:52]
B
And what about dealing with his record? A lot of people are saying, don't apologize. The you voted for the crime bill at a particular time. That's your record. You'll kill yourself if you do that.
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E
Yeah. I think he's going to have to go piece by piece. There are some things which he clearly has to apologize for. Look, his handling of Anita Hill's testimony and the hearings, it was wrong. And unless he is able to address it thoroughly, people will keep bringing it up. But there are other things, like the crime bill, which viewed in the context of now, is a subject of criticism. But he's going to have to say, look, if you vote for me, you are voting for a half century in American government. You're not voting necessarily for one small issue or another. And it's going to be up to people to decide whether they want that. I think part of this is that it's impossible to separate how people view Joe Biden from how they view Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is known for never apologizing, never acknowledging any failure, any fault, any error. And people are desperate for a bit of self reflection, a bit of honesty, a bit of sincerity about the fact that nobody makes perfect decisions. And if Joe Biden can figure out how to navigate that, it's probably to his advantage to do so.
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D
I think part of it also is that Joe Biden at 76, needs to show that he's not stuck in the past.
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E
Right.
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D
So it's important for him to show that he's learned and that he's very much in the moment and has a, you know, modern sense of what's going on in the world.
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B
And it's interesting, some of his just his rhetoric feels, you know, there used to be a basic bargain in this country that when you work hard, you're able to share in the prosperity your work helped create. So there's nothing wrong with that at all. That's worthy and admirable. But is that the way people are talking these days and thinking about dealing with a minimum wage and income inequality and all the rest of it?
- [19:44]
E
Well, I think what's interesting is you hear him striking this very strong economic note, right? And if you go back to, I looked at the interviews that I had with him five years ago, what was fascinating was he was starting to talk at a income inequality, then he was kind of gently criticizing his own party for not doing enough on the middle class, for not talking about the absence of opportunity. And he ended up obviously not running for president in that race. And so I think for him, he feels as if he's been talking about this stuff for a long time, and he's picking up the baton now, it happens to arrive at a moment when there is this big American conversation about capitalism and what it's delivering and what it's not delivering. So, you know, some of the language might sound a little bit musty, though. But on the other hand, people may be actually open to the idea of him saying let's restore some of the equilibrium or at least some of the process by which the gains of business were delivered onto workers to at least a greater extent than they are now.
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D
His strong support from, you know, the firefighters union, for instance, and his very pro labor statements obviously resonate a lot with a lot of Democratic voters and seem to be worrying Trump. Trump seemed so discomfited by the fact that Biden got the endorsement of the firefighters union. He tweeted something like 60 times in one morning trying to attack Biden and claim that the firefighters really loved him more. Despite the endorsement, you could see it truly got under his skin.
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B
Jane, I want to ask you about a story that broke in the Times this morning about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, who had served on the board of a company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch and which seems to pose a problem of a potential conflict of interest for his father. Could you explain that for us? It's a bit complicated.
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D
It is a complicated story. But I think if you step away, what you're looking at is an effort already to try to, to get opposition research done by the right to throw it against Biden much the ways the same kind of opposition research was thrown against Hillary Clinton. In fact, in this case, Peter Schweitzer, who was the author of a book called Clinton cash during the 2016 campaign, is now the author of another book that's full of dirt about various Democratic candidates, especially though I'm sure there's some Republicans he throws in there, too. But that's where this Biden allegation comes out of partly, which is an effort to try to make it look like Hunter Biden's business dealings are a big corrupt problem for his father. It's only the beginning, I think. You know, there are other issues I've seen bubbling up on the right. There was an effort to sort of tar Hunter Biden for business in China and other things. So, I mean, it's a can of worms that the Republicans just can't wait.
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B
To open, despite the party's own Ukrainian problems.
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D
Yeah, you would think that maybe there'd be a little bit of embarrassment among the Trump camp in trying to make corruption an issue, but hey, It's a shameless business.
- [22:59]
B
Yes, indeed.
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E
You know, I think one of the things Joe Biden is going to run on is the idea that he is clean, that he is not. That he is a return to a kind of politics that we associate with the Obama White House that was not racked by allegations of corruption. And the Republicans are going to try to ding him on that. That's one of the reasons why you're hearing about this now from the person responsible for the Clinton cash book. And I think this will also be a question for the media about how people respond when oppo research begins to come into the race. Are people going to vet it? Are they going to evaluate it, or are they going to just report on the existence of it and have that be considered enough? But yeah, I think putting it in the context of what corruption looks like in this White House is probably part of the task.
- [23:45]
B
Okay, thank you both. To be continued.
- [23:47]
E
Thanks, Dorothy.
- [23:49]
D
Thanks so much, Dorothy. So fun to be with you.
- [23:54]
B
Jane Mayer is the New Yorker's chief Washington correspondent and the co author of Strange the Selling of Clarence Thomas. Evan Osnos is a New Yorker staff writer and the authority of Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program is produced by Alex barron for new yorker.com with assistance from Kylie Warner. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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D
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E
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B
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