San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Biden may become victim of Kavanaugh revelations
One victim of the Brett Kavanaugh controversy is Joe Biden, whose possible 2020 presidential run may have gone up in smoke.
Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, and he developed a lot of goodwill in those years. But well before that, he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991. It was his worst moment as a senator, and now it’s haunting him.
Thomas was accused by his onetime colleague in a federal agency, Anita Hill, of long-running sexual harassment. Biden allowed Judiciary Committee members to savage her during questioning during the Thomas hearings and refused to call witnesses
who were prepared to back up Hill’s testimony.
That was all dusty history — until Christine Blasey Ford showed up. Now everyone is looking back at Anita Hill, and Biden’s performance hasn’t aged well. Even he knows it — he has said he owes Hill an apology.
But “sorry” won’t cut it with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, whose influence is only growing. If he runs, Biden is going to be spending a lot of time trying to explain his actions from way back then.
The second shoe: Democrats and Republicans alike are keeping one eye on the clock and the other eye on the door to see if anyone else comes forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
It’s happened before — Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein all issued denials when their first victims came forward. And then came more. Kavanaugh has strongly denied Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that he tried to rape her when they were teenagers. No one else has made a similar accusation against him, and many people who know him say such an attack would be out of character.
You can see why Senate Democrats would hope to drag out the confirmation process — they want to give anyone else who might have something to say about Kavanaugh as much time as possible to emerge. That also explains why some of them weren’t thrilled that Sen. Dianne Feinstein sat on Ford’s allegation after she received it in July — those were valuable weeks that were wasted.
I suspect, however, that President Trump and other Republicans are privately comfortable with holding off for a bit on Kavanaugh’s confirmation as well. The longer no one else comes forward, the better their argument that Kavanaugh must be innocent of Ford’s accusation.
And the less chance that if someone does emerge, the Republicans will have already voted to put Kavanaugh on the court.
Fumble: Sen. Dianne Feinstein may have done the right thing morally by not passing Christine Blasey Ford’s letter along to the FBI sooner — the Palo Alto University professor had asked that her attempted-rape accusation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh be kept confidential after she sent it in July.
But it was a bad political mistake.
What Feinstein presumably didn’t know was that even as she asked for anonymity from the senator, Ford was talking to the Washington Post. So when everything blew up, Feinstein was left holding the bag. Now she’s being pummeled by both both sides for sitting on the letter.
Feinstein broke a basic rule of elected office: If you’re handed a grenade with the pin pulled, give it to someone else as fast as you can.
Old-school fun: They held a classic car festival at Willie Brown Jr. Middle School the other day. It was a combination fundraiser and a fun day for the students.
There were Fords, Chevys and Pontiacs, none of them post-1968. What colors. What rims. What style. Half were owned by Latinos, the other half by blacks.
One car was lavender, and the headlights were trimmed in lavender lights. There was a white Cadillac convertible to die for.
The owners were decked out as well.
And the schoolkids loved it.
I was talking with the school Principal Charleston Brown, a young guy with kids of his own.
He leaves home at 5 a.m. every day so he can be at school to greet every teacher and student. “Five o’clock? Where do you live?” I asked.
“Fairfield,” he said. “I used to be able to sleep until 6, but with traffic these days, I have to build in an extra hour.”
That’s dedication.
Movie time: “A Simple Favor.” A strange name for a strange movie.
It’s about an unusually energetic single mother who is thought of as a joke by other parents, and her involvement with a neighbor who goes missing. It’s a delightful, clever movie full of twists. No name stars, but for sure star characters.
“White Boy Rick.” Another odd movie, about a father who deals guns, a son who is both a drug dealer and an FBI snitch, and a daughter who is an addict.
They are white and caught up in the world of black crime in Detroit in the 1980s. Add in a crew of corrupt DEA agents, and you have a story, but not necessarily an entertaining or enriching one.
A last farewell: We said a final goodbye to Chinatown activist Rose Pak the other day at a ceremony at the Columbarium in the Richmond.
Rose died in September 2016, but it took two years to sort out the various family and legal spats that followed her death.
Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Jane Kim, Norman Yee and Sandra Lee Fewer were all in attendance, as were housing activist Gordon Chin and developer Lawrence Lui. The Columbarium is a beautiful place. I paused to take it all in.
Then the gatekeeper looked up and said, “Mr. Brown, here to look for a spot?”
Hopefully not yet.