In a seven-minute interview on Good Morning America, former Clinton spokesman George Stephanopoulos spent seven minutes throwing softballs to Joe Biden. After a series of questions such as, “When do you expect to get out on the campaign trail?” Stephanopoulos finally mentioned Tara Reade, the woman accusing Biden of sexually assaulting her while she served as his Senate aide in the summer of 1993, with less than 50 seconds to spare.
FULL INTERVIEW: Former vice president and now Democratic presidential hopeful @JoeBiden speaks to @GStephanopoulos in an exclusive interview about coronavirus and how he would handle things. pic.twitter.com/vsiRPjVmxq
— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 12, 2020
This question was no mere softball. As my friend Stephen Miller (no, not that one) likes to call them, this was a beach ball, and yet, somehow, the septuagenarian statesman fumbled it anyway.
“What do you say to Americans who believe Tara Reade and won’t vote for you because of it?” Stephanopoulos asked. The de facto Democratic nominee responded:
Honestly, if Biden had been any more coherent previously in the interview, it would be fair to interpret his unintelligibility as intentional deflection.
Consider that Reade first went public with her assault allegation more than a month and a half ago, and the Democratic nominee for president of the United States still can’t craft a response that doesn’t contradict every single statement he’s ever previously made about sexual assault. For literally no reason, Biden invoked the Democratic pablum of “believe all women” and then backtracked in the same sentence to a commonsense standard, that women have a right to be heard and taken seriously, not automatically believed, which his party lambasted Republicans for standing by during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Then, after two years of Biden and the rest of the party explicitly demanding that Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, get an FBI investigation instead of being raked over the coals by the press, Biden basically threw his own accuser to the wolves, not only denying her any semblance of an official investigation but also preventing Reade from accessing any Senate records that could further corroborate her already credible account.
It would be great if the fourth-highest-paid television news anchor could push back on any of this, but alas, with just 40 seconds in total for Biden to respond, the interview had to come to an end.
