The dam has finally broken on the credible sexual assault allegation against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and, according to a new report by Politico, the claims by his former Senate staffer Tara Reade is “rattling” his vice presidential candidate search. Advisers to multiple potential VP picks told the outlet that, because of the candidates’ hardline stances on Brett Kavanaugh and the Democrats’ “believe all women” mantra, they now find themselves in an increasingly difficult situation.
Attempting to defend Biden against sexual assault accusations “without looking hypocritical,” Politico‘s Marc Caputo reported Thursday, is “a particularly vexing problem for Biden’s potential picks, many of whom played lead roles in opposing the Senate confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.”
“Democrats vigorously applied a ‘believe all women’ standard as they rallied to support his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, leaving a trail of unambiguous statements at sharp odds with the role they’ll need to play for Biden in a general election,” Caputo writes.
“Advisers to four of the potential candidates who spoke to POLITICO — none of whom would go on record — expressed what they described as a sense of frustration that accusations against Biden are being examined more intensely than the more numerous allegations against President Trump,” Caputo explains. “The advisers all said they hoped Biden would speak out soon, but conceded there’s no way he — or those in contention to be his running mate — can continue to avoid the subject as they run for office or jockey to be on the Democratic ticket.”
Biden’s top VP candidates, Caputo explains, must now attempt to square their responses to Reade’s allegations against Biden, which has mounting evidence adding to its credibility, with their “markedly different” responses to the entirely uncorroborated allegations against Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Thus far, Caputo notes, the candidates have “either stood with the former vice president or said nothing.”
One of the anonymous advisers lamented the Democrats’ embrace of the unreasonable “believe all women” mantra, asserting that it never actually meant what it declares. “‘Believe the woman’ didn’t mean believe all women, all the time,” the adviser told Politico. “But this is an era of slogans and we’re paying the price for that.”
The #MeToo movement, the adviser said, was an “over-correction” that came in response to “decades of ignoring women and not believing them.” Now, the Democratic presidential race is caught up in this “over-correction,” the adviser suggested. “It’s not ideal. It’s not what we want to be talking about.”
While Caputo is careful to avoid specifying which of the candidates’ advisers spoke with the outlet off the record, he goes on to highlight the Democratic candidates for whom the Reade allegations are particularly problematic because they were so unequivocally “believers” in Ford’s unsubstantiated allegations: California Sen. Kamala Harris, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Politico’s report follows a similar report by The New York Times published Wednesday describing the mounting “anger” among progressive and women’s rights activists by Biden’s refusal to directly address his former Senate staffer’s claims, especially in light of new evidence adding to her allegation’s credibility. As The Daily Wire noted Wednesday, the tide has begun to turn within the mainstream media on the reporting of Reade’s allegation.
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