Tina Brown, the feminist former editor of Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, appeared on MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle on Tuesday morning to tell Joe Biden his career is over.
“Joe Biden comes from the sort of crustacean era of gender relations, let’s face it,” she said. “He is a man who is from a wholly different, kind of alpha-man-strutting-the-world generation.” These are bold words from a 65-year-old woman whose husband (journalist Harold Evans) is 90.
Ruhle replied, “Do we throw these people out, or do we help them evolve?”
Brown said evolve, and she added “I actually think that Joe Biden has an incredible record” when it comes to the Violence Against Women Act, but like many liberals, she’s still angry Anita Hill didn’t get more help in defeating the Clarence Thomas nomination, and he “blew the opportunity” during the Kavanaugh hearings to proclaim his guilt: “I think, to make that his moment, where he did his whole kinda mea culpa and said ‘I so got that wrong. I so apologize’ and actually call her in and do so, which he never did.”
Ruhle began the interview by referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to “the Joe Biden question” when the California Democrat stated that he is an “affectionate person to children, to senior citizens, to everyone. That's just the way he is.”
However, while noting that "I don't think it's disqualifying” in the 2020 presidential election, Pelosi noted: “What it's important for the vice president and others to understand is, it isn't what you intend, it's how it was received."
Brown threw the brushback pitch:
There is a reason why this movement after Me Too is called Time’s Up. There is a reason why he shouldn’t run, really — which is that it’s not about this that he shouldn’t run. But it’s because he’s not nimble in the mores and the language of today. And I think he’s going to spend a lot of campaign apologizing for all kinds of things he did or didn’t do. Baggage from the past. I think he’s an amazing, noble guy in many, many ways. But I suspect that time is up for Joe Biden.
Tina Brown didn’t lament “baggage from the past” when Hillary Clinton was nominated in 2016. Before the election, Brown said Hillary's campaign looked like a "crucifixion." After Hillary lost, Brown complained she was treated like “Typhoid Mary” and did her interviews in a crouch because everyone obsessed over her e-mails.
