((Guardian piling on)) Joe Biden's very bad week: has his White House run failed before it begins? [View all]

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/02/joe-bidens-very-bad-week-has-his-white-house-run-failed-before-it-begins

Joe Biden's very bad week: has his White House run failed before it begins?

David Smith in Washington

Tue 2 Apr 2019 06.20 BST

Some presidential campaigns take time to hit their stride while others hit the ground running. But Joe Biden appears to be hobbling even before he reaches the starting blocks. The past week has delivered a barrage of damaging news reports that might persuade the former vice president, long agonising over whether to make a third bid for the White House, to keep procrastinating a little while longer.
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This setback followed a backlash last week after the Axios website reported that some of Biden’s advisers were considering linking his campaign announcement with a promise to select Stacey Abrams, a rising star who unsuccessfully ran for Georgia governor last year, as his running mate. Critics found this patronising towards an African American woman who might run for president herself. Abrams responded: “You don’t run for second place.”
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Meanwhile, Biden made his latest attempt to express regret for how the Senate judiciary committee, which he chaired at the time, handled Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas. At the Biden Courage Awards in New York, he said: “To this day, I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved.” Some found the comments inadequate and called on Biden to apologise to Hill directly.

And conservative media refocused attention on past reports about his son Hunter Biden’s links to a Ukrainian oligarch and natural gas company in 2014. It has all been a brutal reminder that this 76-year-old white male centrist, though performing strongly in early polls, can take nothing for granted in a party where the energy is with women, minorities and young progressives. The 2020 election will not be fought in his comfort zone.
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Perpetually hands-on and whispering-in-ears, Biden describes himself as a “tactile politician”. Video of him touching women has previously been dubbed “the audacity of grope” by Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. A moment of reckoning was inevitable in the era of the MeToo era movement. But few predicted it would come before Biden’s even launched his candidacy.
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There was a chorus of support including Susan Rice, a former national security adviser, Meghan McCain, daughter of the late senator John McCain, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, who told the AP: “I don’t think that this disqualifies him from running for president, not at all.”

Indeed, despite the rocky build-up, it would be premature to write Biden off. He has name recognition, that long association with Obama, vast foreign policy experience, numerous friends in the Democratic establishment and a perceived appeal to blue collar workers who deserted the party for Donald Trump in key Midwest states in 2016.
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