I’m poking my head out from my typical lurking because of a new article in the New York Times. The headline: Examining Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Allegation Against Joe Biden. This is not what I was expecting to see in the Times on Easter morning.
This allegation has been making the rounds on social media, being spread by both the alt-left and alt-right. If you look under any Joe Biden tweet, you’ll likely see some allusion to it or someone outright calling Biden a rapist. But since it was only being promoted by the fringes and extremists, it was easy enough to ignore it. Except now it’s in the Times. We can’t ignore it.
I’m not going to go into the specifics, only to say that this accusation involves exactly what Donald Trump was caught on tape bragging about in 2016. To me, this is enough to raise some doubt, as is the timing. In fact, Tara Reade’s entire online history is enough to doubt the veracity of the allegation, as is what we know about Joe Biden as a human being. But here’s the problem: for years, our calling card has been “believe all women.” How do we justify sweeping this under the rug when so many, including Joe Biden, demand all women be heard out?
And that is what makes this specific smear so brilliant and so dangerous. And it seems too perfectly manufactured to have been cooked up by one person. In fact, it is most reminiscent of the swiftboating campaign against John Kerry in 2004.
Back in 2004, we believed John Kerry’s service to the country would be a strength in the battle against George W. Bush’s reelection. And then along came these service members who accused Kerry of lying about his military record and how he came to receive his combat medals. These accusations were spread far and wide before the age of social media. People were claiming Kerry shot himself to get the medals. Attendees at the Republican National Convention were wearing band-aids with purple heart stickers on them. And the Democratic nominee was effectively damaged before Americans went to the polls in November.
Obviously the accusations against Kerry were lies, and it was easy to call those spreading them in TV ads and books liars. That is much harder in this situation with Biden, specifically because of the Democrat’s history with sexual assault allegations. So how do you fight back against this? I genuinely am at a loss.
I don’t believe these allegations against Biden. I don’t know if they were cooked up in Russia, if they are the result of a Bernie supporter going too far, or if they’re somehow connected to the Trump campaign. If this was 2004, we’d be blaming Karl Rove for them.
Joe Biden has definitely had his creepier moments, but this is a fundamentally decent man, one who has been vetted over and over again through the years, including by the excellent Obama campaign. They just happened to miss this one thing that is alleged to have happened back in the 90s?
We are at a point where this allegation is going mainstream and we, along with the Biden campaign, have to be able to respond. This smear is as much about preventing the young, pro-Bernie crowd from lining up behind Biden as it is creating some false equivalence between Biden and Trump in the minds of Americans. It has the potential to severely hurt our nominee in November and it is spreading. What do we do?