Then-Vice President Joe Biden talks to Stephanie Carter as her husband Ash Carter delivers his acceptance speech as the new Secretary of Defense at the White House in 2015. (Gary Cameron/Reuters)

Joe Biden is a creepy old goat. Everyone knows this. There is much photographic evidence of him crossing the line with women. He’s also a liar and a buffoon. But the Democratic party’s public-relations arm, aka the mainstream media, has never before had any incentive to hold Biden up to scrutiny. Why bother? When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious.

For the next few months, though, we’re in an amusing interstitial period when the media actually has a reason to attack their fellow Democrats: any hacks out there who think their party can do better than Biden (or Sanders, or Warren, or Harris, or etc.) can rip into their disfavored candidates in order to give an assist to their preferred picks. All of this goes away as soon as the Democratic pick for 2020 becomes evident, but until then we’ll be seeing some actual vigorous reporting.

Today, because the feminist-leftist staff of The Cut at New York magazine think the Dems can do better than Biden, there’s a devastating first-person account of what it’s like to be a woman and have Creepy Joe sneak up behind you (plus a column, which ran an hour later, saying, “Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer.”) Lucy Flores, then 35, was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Nevada when Biden appeared at an event with her. She says,

I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f***? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me.

Flores didn’t see fit to reveal this before but the prospect of Biden becoming the standard bearer for the party rightly disgusts a lot of people. As Flores notes in her account, Biden’s handsy behavior with women is an open secret. His numbers in polls have been falling, though they are still high, as the implications of an actual Biden candidacy start to sink in. Some political analysts are saying on Twitter that they think the prospect of many more stories along these lines being published will cause Biden to think twice about running. I think he’ll probably still run — how can an ego monster like Biden resist when the polls put him at the top of the pack? — but his 2020 candidacy will perish as quickly as his previous presidential campaigns. The Democratic candidate with the best chance of beating President Trump is doomed.