Life has just gotten a bit more difficult for potential 2020 contender and former Vice President Joe Biden.
In a soon-to-be-released memoir, his wife, Jill Biden, revealed that joining a family of “huggers” wasn’t easy. As a self-proclaimed “introvert,” she says that it made her feel “strange and uncomfortable,” and that she “sometimes found all that affection draining.”
She certainly isn’t alone there. The date of the book’s release couldn’t come at a worse time for Joe Biden, who is facing an ever-increasing number of inappropriate touching complaints.
Letting the cat out of the bag
In passages from “Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself,” as quoted by DailyMailTV, Jill Biden reveals that her husband has always been the touching type, even back in 1975 when they first began dating. “He was always holding my hand, putting his arm around me, or brushing the hair from my face,” she writes.
According to Jill Biden, such shows of affection appear to run in the Biden family.
“I realized that physical affection played an important role in his entire family,” she says. “Val [Joe’s sister] couldn’t walk by the boys without reaching out to touch their shoulders or brush their heads. Their parents stopped by often to shower the boys with kisses.”
Joe Biden appears to have passed this family trait on to his two boys, whom he had with his first wife Neilia. They “never wanted to miss a chance to hold a hand, wrap their arms around each other, or give a kiss,” Jill Biden writes.
She further relates a bedtime ritual in which Joe Biden would gently scratch the boys’ backs and arms to help them fall asleep. “He did the same at Mass as a way of keeping them still,” she says.
8 women … and counting
While mulling over whether or not to enter the 2020 presidential race, Biden has become embroiled in a scandal resulting from his tendency to touch. Eight women have come forward to accuse Joe Biden of making them uncomfortable by smelling their hair, squeezing their shoulders, kissing their heads, and touching their thighs.
Other 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have already seized on this opportunity, using it to not only personally attack Joe Biden — who according to polls would be one of the favorites if he runs — but to highlight the contrast between the Democratic party of his earlier years and its current iteration, which supports the #MeToo movement.
Biden defends himself
Joe Biden personally addressed the allegations on Wednesday in a video posted to social media, in which he did not apologize to any of the women who have spoken out and described his physical contact with others as “gestures of support and encouragement.”
“I have always tried to make a human connection,” he said. “That’s my responsibility I think. I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders to say ‘You can do this.'”
“It’s just who I am,” said Joe Biden, who went on to place part of the blame on changing social norms. “You know social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset.”
“I understand it and I’ll be much more mindful,” he promised. “That’s my responsibility — my responsibility and I’ll meet it.”
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