Lucky: Joe Biden’s Access Hollywood Moment

Lots of books are getting published about Joe Biden by mainstream journalists. They reveal the man the public was not supposed to see. Yet so much of this was hiding in plain sight before 2024. Take for instance Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s 2021 book Lucky, a candid account of Biden’s improbable victory and his sudden sexual harrasment crisis during the Democratic presidential primary.

One evening in late March, Kate Bedingfield dialed Biden from the campaign’s WeWork office to tell him that he was the subject of breaking bad news. Writing in New York magazine’s “The Cut” on March 29, 2019, Lucy Flores, the 2014 Nevada Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, revealed that “an awkward kiss changed how I saw Joe Biden.” In the midst of the #MeToo movement, a reckoning for powerful men who abused their positions to take sexual advantage of women, Flores’s allegation threatened to turn the avuncular former vice president into Creepy Uncle Joe with the speed of an Internet click. Flores accused him of standing behind her, sniffing her unwashed hair, and planting a kiss on the back of her head before endorsing her at a campaign event.

As Bedingfield relayed the allegation, Biden listened silently.

My God, he thought. I didn’t do that—not like that.

At first, he said nothing. Bedingfield and Schultz, who was right beside her, exchanged glances as they waited for the boss to say something. A few seconds felt like an hour. They both knew Biden was a toucher by nature. He embraced women and men. He draped his arm over shoulders and wrapped his fingers around waists. Sometimes he bowed forward to touch foreheads with an acquaintance. Because they knew him—had seen him draw people in close without a hint of sexuality—they were more concerned about the public reaction than the reality.

“I thought I was doing the opposite,” Biden said, processing the shock. “I’ve always tried to support women.”

He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, and he was having a hard time understanding how his actions might have been interpreted differently than they were meant. Already, aides were compiling a list of women who had been around Biden for a long time who could vouch for him. Bedingfield and Schultz recommended releasing a statement in response to the Flores column.

Biden didn’t want to apologize. It took two days for him to put out the statement, which focused on his tendency to offer gestures of physical support on the campaign trail. “Not once—never—did I believe I acted inappropriately,” he said. “If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.”

By that time, videos of Biden awkwardly touching, hugging, or kissing other women had flooded social media. A full-on examination of his record on issues affecting women, which was mixed enough to include both the Anita Hill saga and writing the federal law designed to protect women from domestic abusers, was under way. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Julian Castro, three of his rivals for the Democratic nomination, had already said publicly that they believed Flores or soon would. Some Democrats questioned whether he could continue a campaign that hadn’t even launched yet. The story was spiraling out of control.

Outside the campaign, it was clear that Biden needed to do more to stop the bleeding. But he was reluctant to go any further. The internal debate matched him and the pooh-bahs against the younger aides, with the Gen X and millennial set telling the baby boomers—and Biden, who was born a few years before the boom—that he needed to issue an apology quickly.

Depending on the debate, pooh-bahs and newbies might cross generational lines, but in this case, alarm bells rang much louder for the kids than for Biden and the graybeards. He was not going to apologize. “Joe Biden doesn’t do anything Joe Biden doesn’t want to do,” said one person very close to him.

“I don’t think he understood it on some level,” said a longtime ally involved in the discussions. “He constantly thought ‘Yeah, so what? What’s the big deal?’ He needed a lot of convincing. Every time someone flagged that it was a problem, it went right over his head.”

Biden simply refused to say he was sorry. “He won’t apologize because he thinks he did nothing wrong,” said one adviser. “He’s told us this repeatedly. And if he does apologize everyone will hold this over him from now until the end of the campaign.” That was one of the ways in which Biden’s political instincts weren’t so different from Trump’s. It was difficult for his younger aides to understand why a guy who would often apologize privately if he’d wronged them in some way couldn’t bring himself to say he was sorry in public.

Eventually, grudgingly, he came part of the way around. Biden released a face-to-camera video, filmed at his home in Wilmington, five days after Flores’s column and three days after his initial statement. In it, he reiterated that he believed he hadn’t acted improperly, but promised to be more cognizant of women’s personal space in the future. Then he joked about it all at his next public event, further demonstrating that he was out of touch.

“Dude won’t apologize. He just won’t do it—even when he should,” said one frustrated campaign official. “When we did the Lucy Flores pushback after days of getting the shit kicked out of us and we finally got him on camera, I thought that was fine. But there’s a difference between ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I’m sorry you felt that way.’ ”

What his newer aides were absorbing was a maxim that had been burned into the psyches of generations of their predecessors: You quickly learn in Bidenworld that you can change some things, but you can’t change anything quickly.

If you didn’t know better, the name “Biden” could have been replaced by “Trump” and the story still fits. While there are different outcomes in climate policy and affirmative action that have hinged on which of these two men is president, the reconing the Democratic Party is going through right now is the realization that Biden and Trump had more in common than what mainstream sources of information were willing to entertain from 2019 to 2024. Even before this accusation came out, conservatives’ social media was full of videos of Biden sniffing women’s hair. Five years later, Democrats are awkwardly coming to terms with the reality behind the man who was briefly their champion.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.

The post Lucky: Joe Biden’s Access Hollywood Moment first appeared on Oregon Catalyst.